Artist Talk Impression

Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy

Melissa Milgrom

November 20, 2014

Melissa Milgrom held an artist talk at the Nevada Museum of Art about Taxidermy and how it correlated with art. She had also written a book titled Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, which was the main topic of the talk. Melissa conversed about her many adventures with other taxidermist and shared interesting stories of museums selling and buying stuffed animals. While some believe that taxidermy is just a job of stuffing animals, it is also an art form. It can depict recreation of an animal or by the words of Melissa, a simple mistake can make the piece go from realistic to imaginary.

“Artist are not obliged to tell the truth…,” which is true of many art forms. In taxidermy, it is their task to recreate the animal in such a way that it resembles the animal as if it were in its own niche. However some artist have taken the art form and provided a spin to the process. Artists experimented with taxidermy by providing the animal with human characteristics such as fox heads on a man’s body holding guns.

Taxidermy itself, in my opinion, is an art form of recreating animals, especially when some animals are endangered. Milgrom spoke of a process that some taxidermist had to undergo just to recreate the Panda. They found furs of the same color and manipulated it so that it can fit the size of an actual Panda. These artist went far to capture the essence of the animal without hunting them down.

            Listening to Melissa’s artist talk was truly interesting. I had learned a lot of something I was ignorant about and honestly I see taxidermy in a new way. My impressions about her talk at first was that it was boring, however after fifteen minutes in I found myself being drawn into this alternative art form. Starting from Darwin, Taxidermy was just to provide an image of the wonderful animals of the world. The process though is much like sculpting but more involved. They work with wires, mold, furs and special materials to make the animal more animate. It’s a world of preserving the essence of an animal just like sculpting does for human beings.