With my dad’s permission, I clipped photographs of birds, mammals, and reptiles from his stacks of National Geographic magazines, taping the creatures over every inch of my walls-and the swaths of ceiling I could reach-to weave a patchwork menagerie. I handled the animal so often that I chipped off both of its ears. My favorite one was a hippo with the tip of its pale snout dipped in a rich navy glaze. My dad bought me a new blue-and-white figurine from the airport each time he flew on business trips to Thailand, Singapore, or Nairobi. I chose to display it on my bookshelf near my collection of miniature china animals with lapis paisleys painted in intricate wisps across their backs. Marveling at the paw’s dry ivory fur, four lead-colored nails, and stiff dewclaw split to the quick, I considered the foot too precious to dangle from my backpack’s zipper. Instead, I settled for a lucky rabbit-foot keychain from the pet store at Twinbrook Shopping Center. If I could’ve purchased taxidermy from the museum’s gift shop in addition to geodes, arrowheads, and dime-sized trilobites, I would’ve transformed my bedroom into a wondrous forest populated with a hawk on my bookcase, a lemur on my lamp, a lynx in a corner, and a fox on the edge of my bed frame, one paw lifted midair, like a tightrope walker. A collector of rocks and fossils, I’d ride the metro into DC to visit the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History as often as my parents would take me. I decided to take Allis’s recommended course for beginners, “Birds 101.”Īs a child, I kept a number of pets: a strawberry blond hamster, a pair of parakeets, a fire-bellied newt, a short-lived guppy, several generations of sweet-tempered mice, a frisky rat, and three beloved indoor cats. In her studio on the fourth floor of an arts building on Spring Street, Allis offers a range of weekend workshops for an array of misfits, hipster craftspeople, Hollywood types-and the plain old morbidly curious, like me. In 2008, Allis (pronounced “Alice”) quit her marketing job at Disney, where she earned a six-figure salary, to attend the Advanced Taxidermy Training Center in Montana. Around the studio, she wears a ponytail and simple button-up with rolled sleeves, but in a glamorous portrait on Prey’s website, Allis poses between two taxidermied house cats like a deadpan 1940s pin-up star: carmine lipstick and a dark rockabilly pompadour. During my first class at Prey Taxidermy, in downtown Los Angeles, I could see in the slit breast of my specimen a mix of delicacy and toughness, the bird’s firm insides cool from the freezer and as flush as a plum.Īllis Markham, the owner of Prey, is a wisecracking thirty-two-year-old with fair skin and dyed black hair. It’s tissue-fine yet lizard-like-wheat-colored chainmail for an airborne knight. The skin of a dead starling is hardier than you’d think.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |