Halloween Queen

Several years ago, I visited English taxidermist Emily Mayer for the first time at her home in the Norfolk countryside. It was late-September and overcast when we pulled into the long gravel driveway that led to her studio which was once a workhouse hospital used to treat poor boys with tuberculosis. Now it contains animal corpses for art star Damien Hirst and Mayer’s other clients, which include grieving dog owners, the celebrity chef Marco Pierre White (who once sent a three-foot pike here by chauffeured car), and the odd skeleton collector, bat enthusiast, or lobster freak. Although Emily is an animal lover who would never kill a living being, even a fly (literally; she has refused to do so for Mr. Hirst), she loves the disturbance factor. As she puts it, “Animals die and kill things, and they lick their asses, and they shit. They just do stuff a taxidermist won’t show. Taxidermists are all about the beauty of an animal, but I find beauty in death.”

If you met Mayer, you wouldn’t doubt that. That September, I followed her inside the converted workhouse. The place was dark and cold, a maze of long corridors. Her five dogs went nuts, running frenetic circles around her. “That’s Alice. Her father [impregnated] her aunt, which makes her inbred,” she said with a jarring bluntness. Visiting Mayer for the first time is something like being at the dentist after he’s given you “sweet air” and you’re smiling as he drills your teeth.

Downstairs is her workshop, the kid of job shop where you’d expect to see a carpenter turn wood on a lathe or a mechanic rebuild an engine. We passed bird skulls and stoats that she used to pick off of hedgerows as a kid (some now hung on her bedroom door). Above a window hung a mummified cat, all dried up and sinewy, like something you’d see in the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And lying on the floor was the glossy head of a black horse that looked as if it had just been axed off. I glanced at its teeth, slightly visible through slack lips. Mayer grinned but offered no explanation.

“Ugh! That dead!” I shrieked when we came upon a sleeping foxhound. The dog was curled up near a radiator. It looked so peaceful, so alive, that I petted it to be sure. It was as hard as fiberglass. “I like things in repose,” she said, coolly. “I like that disturbance factor. If it had glossy eyes, then you’d know it wasn’t alive.” The calico cat, on the other hand, was obviously dead. One of her failed experiments (she keeps them), it had shattered like a broken plate; furry shards lay on her worktable awaiting reassembly. “I had more of a headache with that pussycat than I needed. It was a bloody nightmare!” she groaned. That said, Mayer will only preserve pets as a humanitarian gesture for bereaved owners who absolutely need an effigy of an animal to remember it by, and, of course, always for art.

Melissa Milgrom is the author of Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy,reviewed in Audubon's May-June 2011 issue.