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