Sarina Brewer: Custom Creature Taxidermy

Sarina Brewer is an experienced naturalist that has over the course of her later years started to craft unique taxidermy specimens. Her portrait is more resemblance of a Victorian sorceress and her philosophy is to “let nothing from nature go to waste, and use all of an animal even after death”. Her finished are but different from the rest of the taxidermy circles in a morbid, but beautifully interesting way. She fuses different parts of animals together. Some are mammals combined with birds, or the flying type with horned creatures, nocturnal animals with those who occupy the waters, etc. She first started sculpting and painting with the animal remains, creating some eerie visual canvasses that would probably not be accepted by most galleries. Her mediums were oil, and found products. Gradually this evolved into what is her immense skill and collection today. She volunteers her time as a biologist (fuck yea!), and participates in conservation of the fauna and flora or wildlife rescue on the side. None of the animals she uses were killed by humans, they either died from other predators, disease, age, etc. Her appreciation of death is quite close to mine and recognizing how different cultures honor the dead and connect with them in unorthodox ways. I would love to do something similar by building skeletons for a museum or cleaning found bones and dead animals for preservation and study. Animals are beautiful in death and life! Unlike human are rarely either of these. This is her homage to the animals by giving them artistic meaning in postmortem.

Sarina ““I call it art, you can call it whatever you want.”

Read about some of the processes and look through a portion of the gallery here

With her traditional pieces, they are all set in some kind of scene. The coyote with the ermine was my favorite here. It shows the behavior of the predator/prey cycle in still life. The fantasy works are some of the more obscure experiments. These could be mistaken for the creations of a mentally insane person with extreme dexterity and creative expression, but each are carefully crafted with the knowledge of past scientific experience. Of these pieces, some are based off of ancient myth and folklore such as the Capricorn, Griffin, and Chimera. To speak of the sideshow pieces are like peering into a freak show of mutated animals, these ones to my knowledge are real, and have been used for taxidermy in same way but present such a different perception from their essential state. A two headed goat, among them and a fake werewolf head, this one being my favorite of them all. Esodermy was another term she created which is the preservation of the animal with just the skin removed.

mummified werewolf head

She also has an array of preserved specimens set in glass jars or altar boxes for your own cabinet of curiosities. These are professionally preserved with the same antimicrobial solution that is used in museums and will not decay with proper handling of them. A brown bat, a sharks head, several rats,a lizard and fetuses. She also has a handmade arrangement of jewelry, mostly of small skulls, and claws. Some of her items from the galleries can be had at her etsy shop here http://www.etsy.com/shop/CustomCreature?section_id=5974549

The continuum of her morbid crafts can be found here but below is a taste of the arcane fauna worship I found particularly to my taste. www.customcreaturetaxidermy.com