Rob Colson - Taxidermy Gone Wrong

Contents

Many animals died in the making of this book... Contents At first glance, the world of taxidermy may seem a bit, well, stuffy. Dedicated experts, with detailed knowledge of biology and anatomy, labor away behind the scenes in museums to re-create life-like animals and give us an idea of how they lived. Well, forget about all that business. There is a new breed of taxidermists in town who have said Stuff that! Were going to show you animals as they have never looked or lived before. These taxidermists give their animals clothes.

They put them on bicycles. They turn them into acrobats and sports stars. They transform them into figures from mythology. And they mix and match to make brand-new creatures. Pigs will finally fly! Taxidermy first went wild in Victorian times. In the 1850s, strange dioramas began to appear in a pub in the sleepy English village of Bramber.

The pub owners son, Walter Potter, had dabbled in taxidermy as a boy in an attempt to preserve his much-loved pet canary. As he practiced his art, Potter let his imagination run amok, creating scenes filled with animals in distinctly human poses and predicaments, from kittens at a wedding to rabbits in a classroom. Following his lead, Victorian taxidermists started to produce all manner of anthropomorphic scenes. Potter himself opened a museum to display his weird and wonderful dioramas. Fast-forward to the early 2000s, and taxidermy took a bold step into the absurd with the Rogue Taxidermy movement. Stuffed animals started to appear in fashionable New York art galleries.

This new generation of artists thought nothing of messing with nature, combining body parts to create flying goat-fish creatures or three-headed mice. And why not? While traditional taxidermists labor to produce life-like scenes, the rogue taxidermists were solely concerned with their own imaginations. And what rich some might say warped imaginations they were! These were scenes from the carnival, post-mortem freak shows of the fabulous and fantastic. Today, many more taxidermists have taken to the internet to peddle their wares. Often they are entirely self-taught. If you want to have a scene created out of your twisted imagination, somebody out there will be more than happy to oblige.

Is your heart set on a heavy metal band of grasshoppers? No problem. What about a sinister gang of hooligan-hamsters? Give them a couple of months, and its yours. Maybe you will be inspired by the creations in this book. Weve gathered together a selection of the wildest taxidermy out there, snapped in situ by incredulous travellers or placed up for sale by their proud creators. If you can think it, the chances are someones stuffed it.

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