Unusual Gifts

One of the perks of doing what I do is people tend to remember and get in touch when they see/find something they think I might like. Pretty cool right?

Being a bit of a packaging junkie myself, something that I always find interesting is how people wrap up, preserve and pack the items they save for me. I get frozen squirrels wrapped in ten corner shop bags, brown and white pigeons in hat boxes and a little dried up black widow spider sent over in Tiffany's box!

Here are two photos of some recent gifts...

Dinosaurs and Freak Taxidermy

I've been restoring some work I made a while back.



I'm not usually one for "taxidermy freaks". I tend to find that concept (and often execution) all a bit easy/amateur. That said, I still have a bit of a soft spot for these guys... perhaps because of the obvious/cartoon like head/body switch. These were some of my first sculptures involving taxidermy before I learned how to do it myself, so perhaps it's sentimental in that way too.

At the time I was interested in the idea of birds being the closest living ancestors of dinosaurs. I liked the idea of some crazy scientist dude trying to bring dinosaurs back to life by using birds. In this case, the bird used was an edwardian grouse with a decorated mount.