Turning Roadkill Into Art | National Geographic

I think what I'm aiming for is this notion of, I guess, seduction and revulsion. Something that's really beautiful, really lush, rubbing up against something that's also perhaps repulsive. I'm an artist and roadkill resurrector.

The first body of work that I really did in the sort of vein was called "Domestic Arrangements", and "Domestic Arrangements" has the aesthetic of a magazine spread of the perfect suburban home. So, there's these sort of really bright colors, lots of pattern, at the same time that it's just not quite right.

This is my studio, which is space for taxidermy, for making photographs, snakeskins, and for my various collections of anything from the natural world that I find. The project developed because I moved here to New Jersey, and my husband and I bought this house, so I spending a lot of my free time looking through home design magazines, then going on this commute where I intersect with a lot of roadkill.

I think it was that combination that kind of came together to begin the projects that I've been now working on for close to seven years. So this is where I find starlings all the time, and actually probably some other little critters too. I found a groundhog here. But there's something—what's that? That one's clearly too far gone.

Oh yeah, he's really beautiful. Looks like he had something in his mouth, like he caught a bug or something. He was probably paying attention to that, not Attar's. You have to sort of pick roadkill up as you see it, but when you see it, it doesn't necessarily always happen at a convenient time to use it in a still life or come up with a creative idea for it.

So for that reason, I have a freezer where I keep my specimens until they're ready for their close-up. Excuse a little bit frozen Tomatoes. That's a baby bunny; he's just like sort of cute and sad at the same time.

When you pick up a squirrel, you have a chance to look at that thing really closely in a way that you can't look at that animal as it scurries by. The way the process really works is I'll have a creature, whatever it may be, I'll sort of think about the form of that creature. Then I start to think, like, well, how could I pose it with these various objects?

A lot of the initial process of shooting is just sort of setting up some fabric backdrops, putting the animal in front of it, and sort of seeing how the light plays, how the color plays. When you have something that's beautiful that's also dead, it immediately introduces the tension.

There is a long history of this memento mori—remember death—in artwork. Really, isn't that to sort of show that there's all this lushness and all this beauty, but it's also fleeting, and so you should sort of appreciate that beauty for as long as you can.

I feel like in some way, I am taking these animals and removing them from a spot where they have unfortunately been killed, and I try ultimately to give them a respectful end. So I might immortalize them in a photograph or perhaps their skin in taxidermy, but then I bury them in the woods, and I'd like to think that that's a better end for them.