BY: SHAY ANSARI
These chilling sculptures of human faces on real animal corpses are artist, Kate Clark’s, way of uniting mankind with the wild. When you think taxidermy, you probably aren’t thinking ‘what a great way to connect with our natural roots’ but Clark’s vision is to evoke empathy from its audience. “The viewer is faced with a lifelike fusion of human and animal that investigates which characteristics separate us within the animal kingdom, and more importantly, which unite us,” she explains in her artist statement.
When shopping for animal hides, Clark seeks out the ones that have been damaged, particularly in the facial area, knowing that taxidermists will not be interested. She sews the animal’s corpse back together but has different plans for the head. She takes the time to sculpt out her model’s face into clay before uniting them with the corresponding animal body. Covering the model’s face with the creature’s real skin and even eyelashes, she pins everything back together to create her strange, and chilling masterpiece.
I am not a fan of taxidermy. But when I saw Kate Clark’s work, I perceived it as a big fuck you to those who shoot innocent animals, tear them apart, only to sew them back together and hang them as a mantelpiece in the dining room. Clark’s sculptures are disturbing, and so they should be. The audience witnesses not only the doomed fate of the innocent animal, but also a fellow human being, forever destined to be gawked at in corners of old homes. Experiencing the simultaneous suffering of both man and wild draws the two spectrums of life very close together.
“The viewer has an intimate relationship with the face and then identifies with the animal, acknowledging the animalistic inheritance within the human condition,” Clark states. Her work transports us back to our roots when man and wild were once one.
Sources: kateclark.com
