As a child, I visited my family’s cattle ranch, and entertained romantic notions of wilderness. During a residency in west Texas, I began working as a taxidermist, and I started asking questions about why people created and collected such animal objects.
The fabrication of fauna is an expression of longing for proximity to and communion with wildlife. We use animal objects as ways of telling ourselves stories about our relationships to other species. But as the word longing suggests, our desires are never fulfilled, and the outcomes are complicated, unpredictable, and contradictory.
I create creatures as a visualization of the cognitive dissonance permeating contemporary representations of wildlife. The animals’ bodies are vessels for our unfulfilled desire, made to serve us as allegorical forms in the stories we tell. The work considers the relationship between storytelling and environmental science in determining the unfolding future of ourselves and our biological others.