Dead birds in the fridge, formaldehyde rats in the bedroom and rabbits ears in the post. Freak show, or just the normal waking world of a practicing taxidermist?
I meet Chloe Mc Carrick on one of the first bright spring days in Manchester City centre to discover the wonderful world of Taxidermy and how she uses it within her art practices. She breezed across the road to greet me, summer dress flowing, and all smiles. I’m intrigued; firstly because it’s Manchester and it’s not raining, and secondly I was about to find out what the attraction was with playing with dead things.
Chloe begins to tell me about where it all started and how her enchantment with birds became a curious obsession. “This is going to sound really weird actually”, starts Chloe, with a coy smile. “Well, when I was about 7, I was playing in the garden and a bird fell out of a tree and landed on the floor. It was breathing really heavily and, kind of, looked as though it was going to die. So I put it in a box and went to tell my parents, and basically it died. Ever since then, just looking at it dead, it wasn’t upsetting in anyway, it was just kind of interesting, and to be able to study something so close up and be able to see things that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to see and get close to them. So for me it was interesting to be able to see them up close and all the tiny minute little details”.
DIGGING UP BONES
“When pets died we’d bury them and then we’d dig them up after they had rotted, so I could have a look at their bones, so it was just really interesting for me in that sense probably more in a biological way, rather than in an artist way, at that age”, she says airily. “Growing up in the countryside as well, there were always things that you would find. I had a big collection of Skulls, I had a big collection of butterflies and I have got a big collection of framed butterflies now, like mounted ones, so I just learnt how to preserve certain things being little, and then when I got older I wanted to actually learn how to preserve birds”.
She goes on to explain how her interest followed her through university where she used photographic methods to challenge people’s ideas on mortality, “It started mainly when I was at university doing photography and I did a project on photograms. Photogram’s are a stencil of the real, basically, so I used it as a kind of death mask so you get the specimens and you put them straight onto the photographic paper, shine the light through it and it creates a stencil of what you have…and creates a negative. Then you can contact print it into a positive. So you have a positive and a negative, and it’s light and dark and it was challenging people’s perceptions of mortality and life, and the cycles”. “So then it got me into thinking well, why not take the actual death of something, and instead of just being able to preserve it within an image, actually preserve it within real life, so I went and did the Taxidermy course”.
AN ANCIENT MYSTICAL RITE
Taxidermy has been a practice used in many cultures since ancient times used in religious ceremonies and mystical rites. The word itself is Greek for classifying skins and is the art of mounting dead animals for display such as hunting trophies or other sources of study. In the early 20th century, artist began to preserve items for exhibitions such as Carl Akeley, who created the world’s first diorama in 1980. Although this is now an acceptable method seen in many exhibitions, people can still have quite adverse reactions to preserved animals and be quite disgusted by the thought of staring into the pickled eyes of death.
It would seem that Chloe has not been excluded from such responses, “People think that it’s quite gruesome, well, apart from popping its eyes out and bashing its brains out, it’s quite easy”, she assures me. “One of the girls that live in my house gets really angry. She got really angry when I brought the green finch home”, she adds, clearly quite upset about the situation. “She went, ‘what are you doing? and I said, ‘well I’m just putting this green finch in the freezer, look how beautiful it is’, and she was like ‘fuck’sake, I don’t agree with this, I don’t like it’. I said ‘well what do you mean, its all wrapped up, it’s in a box. I don’t want anyone to squash it, and I told the rest of my house, I don’t want this to get crushed’. They disagree with this but are happy to have other dead animals in there, even though they have probably died in an unethical way”.
After listening to the reasons why she does this, it becomes understandable, appreciative of the animal even, but, is Taxidermy art? “I suppose in a way everybody is entitled to their own opinion aren’t they, on what is art and what isn’t art, in any kind of art form on what is art and what isn’t art, so if you justify what your doing, and you justify it for personal reasons for personal expression then I’d say that it is an art form but if people are just doing it or just viewing taxidermy on walls in like an old country pub then that’s kind of me that’s looking at it in a totally different way. I wouldn’t say that is art because they have been created as a trophy rather than an art piece so it depends on the person that is doing it, if it looks like a big hunting trophy and whether it’s something that’s a little more delicate and actually has a little bit more meaning behind it. So yeah its kind of everybody’s own perceptions I think. It is quite a tough question to answer, because a lot of people are really upset with me when I say that I do taxidermy and when they come into my bedroom and see that it’s covered in birds and butterflies. I have about eight taxidermied birds in my bedroom and I’ve got a rat in formaldehyde and like, all of its body parts open and all labeled its really cool, and I’ve got a rabbit as well and its a white rabbits head and its got that torn, and its got the digestive system of the rabbit. It’s really cool”.
I enquire if her ‘works’ are available to buy, “I don’t sell them. No” she quickly says. “Well the thing that I’m working on at the moment is, it’s actually destroying them. So I make them, and take ages, and you make the mannequins and the measurements, and actually the precise nature of it, and then I’m working on actually burning them until they are totally destroyed. So it’s going back round again. I’m playing god once again, and I’m actually getting rid of it once it’s been done, and then using that to either do a painting using the charcoal or crushing them into some kind of form and making them into a sculptural piece. Its kind of going back to its roots, it’s kind of like the earth to earth, dust to dust ashes to ashes kind of scenario. So that’s the thing that I am sort of working on at the moment but there is certain specimens that I wouldn’t do that with, like I’ve got a green finch in the freezer that someone found for me over Christmas in their garden, it’s so beautiful”.
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