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She brings dead animals to life – with taxidermy
Brut America
Follow
6/17/2022
Her job is to bring dead animals to life …
Brut met Divya Anantharaman at her studio where she demystified the often misunderstood art of taxidermy.
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Transcript
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00:00
A lot of people, when they meet me, they tell me that I'm not what they would expect as a taxidermist.
00:04
I'm like, which part? Is it that I'm femme-presenting? Is it that I'm a person of color? Like, which part?
00:17
To me, I'm like, it makes total sense that I would be a taxidermist because I love animals.
00:22
My parents moved here from Jamaica. Being an artist of any kind was not first on their priority of things they wanted me to be.
00:35
My experiences with animals were very much through natural history museums and seeing these dioramas and displays.
00:41
I was fascinated that someone could take an animal after its life has ended and turn it into a work of art and appreciation.
00:53
This is one of my favorite pieces. This is a black-throated magpie jay, and it's sort of a predator-and-prey scene.
01:07
We've got the jay looking at the mouse. They're both in a little bit of a face-off.
01:11
With taxidermy, you can get close to nature in a way that you can't when it's wild.
01:16
You can spend as much time as you want looking at a bird, and you have these moments of stillness and these moments of contemplation.
01:22
It also has this thinking about our mortality as well and the things that we leave behind.
01:27
This piece is a recreation of an antique piece. The bird is one that I mounted in there using the antique gears and components inside.
01:35
And if I wind it up, it actually sings.
01:46
Taxidermy has a past that it really has to recover from.
02:04
Modern taxidermy is all about sourcing things legally, first of all, and sustainably.
02:10
A lot of taxidermists now are very transparent about sourcing.
02:14
For me, it's important to let people know where the animals I use come from.
02:23
I am mostly a bird taxidermist, so almost all the birds in my work are domestically raised.
02:28
A lot of the work I do, if it's museum work, the museum itself provides a specimen.
02:32
And museums have salvage permits, and they're able to get specimens from rehabbers and places like that.
02:44
So I have a hardware store type of tool wall here.
02:48
So a lot of these are used for molding and sculpting, so for sculpting foam, for sculpting wood.
02:54
I don't think a lot of people realize how labor-intensive it is to do taxidermy.
03:04
This is a replica flamingo that I'm working on.
03:09
This is a replica flamingo that I'm working on.
03:13
This is for a TV show.
03:15
Real flamingos are difficult to find legally and sustainably.
03:19
So these replica flamingos I make from different domestic birds.
03:23
So I have some chicken feathers, some goose feathers.
03:26
These pins are holding the feathers in place.
03:30
People who become taxidermists just have this ability and this passion to want to tell the story of an animal.
03:37
Whether that story is a very scientific one, as is done in museum taxidermy,
03:41
or whether it's a more fantastical one, as is done in more interpretive taxidermy,
03:46
I think that is what taxidermists are driven by.
03:48
They're not driven by a love of death.
03:50
It's quite literally, and physically, and emotionally, and mentally, it's a labor of love.
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