Artist Lisa Black has an affinity for dead animals (not to be confused with this Lisa Black, a watercolor/acrylic painter). She likes to mount them (in the taxidermilogical sense) and create thought-provoking (if not a little disturbing) creations. A recent post on treehugger.com, has an interesting take on her work:
“She titles each modified creature with the word ‘fixed’, as if to imply that they were somehow broken in their original state. Perhaps, in our technologically hypercharged day and age, it is somehow easier to regard animals as having cold, mechanical innards rather than organic ones–almost as if that would alleviate mankind of some moral responsibility in our present relationship with them.
In the end, we’re reminded of how much more complex the animal’s organic machinery is to the most complex human constructions–and that there’s no clock to wind when their time is up.”
More of Lisa’s work with this bent can be seen in a gallery here. Below are some more pictures of her machinery-ied/ mechanical concoctions:
She’s also responsible for the site www.guildedbutterflies.com, a site that sells necklaces and broaches created from sustainably harvested butterfly wings. I have a necklace I purchased from an Audubon shop with an inset of a butterfly wing also harvested sustainably, so I find Lisa Black’s shop intriguing. Her pins and necklaces have the wings shellacked onto bamboo with a hinge in the middle so the pendant can be worn open or closed. They’re quite pretty:
A Bit of Stardust 
Great works. At first glance it was a live fawn with a prosthetic. The turtle would delight a toddler as the answer to that question of what’s under that shell. But I laughed out loud with delight at the hinged butterfly. Thanks for posting this
[…] More recent artists working with taxidermy have continued to expound this contradiction. Lisa Black, for example, makes objects in which the animal’s skin has been peeled back to expose a mechanism […]