Artist Statement 

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In my studio practice I am concerned with representation of death, health, taxidermy ethics, and ethics of treatment of animals. Through depicting animals that have met an early death in varying stages of the taxidermic process I share how I extend care and my grief experienced while taxidermying animals. I seek to encourage empathy and to share how beautiful and intimate the newer movement of sustainable taxidermy is in contrast to other historically crueler practices of taxidermy such as trophy hunting and building museum displays. 

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As a chronically ill person, my body is too weak and vulnerable to sustain itself without continuous and extensive support from human medicine; in other words, I am a human-animal that was meant to die young, my survival is an unnatural defiance of the survival of the fittest. Due to this, I feel a profound kinship with any young non-human-animal that has died as a result of natural selection, as I should have, were I not born a human-animal who is privileged to have been deemed valuable enough to keep alive. 

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I am critical of the separation of humans from other animals. Through my artwork I present ethical questions of our treatment and understanding of inherited systems of valuing non-human-animal life. My work seeks to encourage empathy and asks viewers to grapple with our place and responsibility in nature as human-animals, specifically how our actions (driving, trophy hunting, fur farming, the pet industry) have consequences and negatively impact or end the lives of non-human-animals. How might we change our ways of thinking to be less damaging?

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Some of the animals I work with have had deaths resulting from human presence in their natural environments (roadkill). That being said, none of the animals I work with have lost their life for the express purpose of taxidermy or art. In fact, most of the animals I work with died natural deaths at a very young age due to stillbirth, failure to thrive, sickness, rejection by mother, or some other form of natural selection resulting in their body not being strong enough to sustain life on their own.