She cares not a wink if people think she's mad; at least they remember her. "I can ring up people from way back in my past and say, 'Hi, I'm Emily the taxidermist,' and they go, 'Oh, right. Yeah.'"
The first time she rang me was to get my flight information, and it took me forever to figure out who was on the phone. The voice on the other end was so deep and gravelly from chain-smoking that I thought it was Jack Fishwick pulling my leg. It's only now that I'm not completely flustered by the words "Emily here." Before I hung up, I asked if she wanted anything from New York: bagels, perhaps, or an IV NY T-shirt. She gave it a quick thought, then said definitively, "Novelty sunglasses with holographic rolling eyeballs."
I left New York for England on September 14, 2003. I caught the Norfolk train from London and took it to Diss, the closest stop to Mayer's house. It was balmy outside, and Diss station (a cement platform with an espresso machine) was deserted except for a man reading a newspaper. I paced back and forth in the fragrant heat, waiting for Mayer. Then I glanced up and saw a tall, imposing figure with short-cropped hair, dressed all in black, striding purposefully down the platform. With the heavy black work boots and black wraparound sunglasses, it was hard to tell whether the person was a man or a woman. He or she did not resemble a taxidermist. Then I saw the butcher knives glinting in the sun. It was Mayer, and the knives were her earrings.
She kissed my cheek in a way that was more London artist than rural taxidermist. I dodged the knives (she sharpens them). Unsure of what to say, I handed her the holographic sunglasses. She passed me the wraparounds, and when she did, I could see her elegant facial bones and huge, darkly expressive brown eyes. She led me to her silver Citroën van and lit a roll-up, then we drove to her house in each other's sunglasses.
She sounded tough. Every other word was "fuck" or "bloody hell." Yet her lips trembled when she spoke, as if she had just consumed a pot of espresso, and peeking above her boots were her trademark hot-pink socks. At the crossroads of two dairy farms, in the minuscule village of Guilt Cross, we pulled into a gravel driveway that led to what looked like a huge brick factory (seventy-six windows and fifty-six radiators): Mayer's house. This 1906 workhouse hospital originally treated poor boys with tuberculosis. In old photos, the yard is filled with consumptive patients lying on cots, getting some fresh air (a common treatment for TB).
Now it contains animal corpses for Damien Hirst and Mayer's other clients, who include grieving dog owners, the bad-boy 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. When Mayer bought the workhouse in 1995, it was being used to store grain for neighboring farms. After years of renovations, she and Loker have transformed it into two artists' studios, each with its own kitchen, bedroom, and freezer—one for meat ("domestic"), the other for carcasses ("Emily's").
I followed Mayer inside. The place was dark and cold, a maze of long corridors. Her five terriers went nuts, running frenetic circles around her. "That's Alice. Her father fucked 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's after he's given you "sweet air" and you're smiling as he drills your teeth. I went upstairs to unpack. My room had a view of grazing Holsteins. On the nightstand was a worn paperback by Nicholas Parsons, Dipped in Vitriol, an anthology of "hatchet art reviews." The cover had a picture of a smashed tomato on it.
After lunch, she led me to her two-story studio, called Flying Bear. Upstairs, in a minimally finished attic that resembled an art gallery, are her sculptures. It is a group show by a single artist. I glanced at her seven iridescent rooks (taxidermic) perched on a weather-beaten fence post, then examined her crowlike bird surgically assembled out of scraps of old leather and bits of rusty metal. The crow, one of her found-object sculptures, was abstract yet somehow conveyed more life than the taxidermy. Indeed, it revealed someone who is uncannily in tune with animals—not just their glossy coats but the inner movement of every muscle, tendon, and bone.
Downstairs is her workshop, the kind of job shop where you'd expect to see a carpenter turn wood on a lathe or a mechanic rebuild an engine. It's a well-organized clutter of paints, saws, tools, drills, credit cards (used as resin scrapers), and Frankenstein-like chemistry setups with heat lamps, funnels, thermometers, handwritten formulas, and plastic bins for rotting carcasses: erosion-molding equipment.
We passed bird skulls and death masks and boxes of mummified weasels 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's 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 glassy 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 fucking pussycat than I needed. It was a bloody nightmare!" she groaned.
Mayer does preserve dogs and cats. She preserves dogs and cats for the same reason other taxidermists are afraid to: she enjoys the challenge of replicating the expression of an animal that someone once knew intimately. (And since her mounts satisfy pet owners, she doesn't get stiffed—another reason taxidermists won't mount pets these days.) Mayer's canines are so spot-on that they even fool live dogs. Her terriers actually curl up with the cast foxhound and fall asleep. That said, Mayer will preserve pets for only one of two reasons: as a humanitarian gesture for a bereaved pet owner who absolutely needs an effigy of that animal to remember it by, and, of course, for art.
Outside Mayer's workshop is a small annex with huge doors that she had installed to accommodate massive carcasses. That day the room was blocked with an orange barrier that said no entry. It was her current Hirst project, which she was bound not to show until it was finished. I was disappointed. As captivating as Hirst's sculptures are while on exhibit at the Guggenheim in Bilboa, the Tate Britain, or any of the world's other leading bastions of contemporary art, I was far more interested in the process of how they are made—the messy, complicated part that a museum would never show. I mentioned how frustrating it must be to work in secret for years. She shrugged. "There [are] times when I'm glad my tongue is tied so I don't have to talk about it—especially at parties. It gets exhausting, people asking what's the biggest animal you've ever stuffed. So I don't say I'm a taxidermist anymore. If someone asks what I do, I just say I'm a sculptor and I occasionally work with dead animals," she said.
Taxidermists are notoriously cagey, but no one is cagey like Mayer, whose favorite aphorism is "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say" (E. M. Forster). Fortunately, you can see just about everything Mayer has ever said, because she is a master archivist who has been documenting her own life since she was thirteen. Her JPEG files of her work for Hirst, for instance, are practically in real time. "I keep a record of my breathing," she said, exhaling smoke.
Then she led me into the kitchen, covered the table with scrapbooks and old photos, and launched into a show-and-tell that lasted for three days and nights, not unpleasantly, I might add, except that Mayer does not pause for food. According to her two assistants, David Spaul and Carl Church, she can survive on a diet of nicotine and coffee. That said, Mayer's kitchen is actually pretty normal, except for the wineglass shelf with the kangaroo head, the wall of cutting boards that also has a ferret leash (in its original package), and the flower vase wit
h a beard of twelve white mice strung together. "I did that for Damien's Christmas party," she explained. "The theme was beards." She grabbed two beers out of the fridge and flicked a lighter she called "the Elephant Man" because it depicted a naked guy with super-enhanced masculinity.
When I flipped through one of her childhood scrapbooks, labeled "Twenty Years a-Growing," I could see that she's always seen the world from a slightly twisted perspective. An early Christmas wish list had "braces" (to look American), "Beano books" (a classic comic book series for kids), and "a real syringe." There was a self-portrait of her head wedged in a trap, and the transcription of a childhood dream in which she fatally conked a puppy on the head, then revived it with a saucer of milk. "My bible when I was eight," she said, handing me a musty copy of Pets, Usual and Unusual by Maxwell Knight. "It brings me back," she said, eyeing me to see if I was damaging the spine. Not only did she describe her pet squirrels, hooded rats, and ferrets—in some cases she could produce the actual items. With a magician's flourish, she lifted an aluminum Jell-O mold off the table, and there was the injured rabbit she had tried to save by suturing. "I'm not good at throwing things away," she said, cocking her head to the side.
Her mother, Irmelin Mayer, is from Berlin and was a theatrical milliner in London. Her father, Tomi, immigrated to London from Mauritius and worked as a scenic artist for the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, painting backdrops for ballets and operas. "I've slept through more operas than you've been to in your entire life," she told me. Sometimes Tomi would bike home from work in his paint-splotched overalls carrying sugar cane he'd just picked up at a city market and say that he'd been to Mauritius. Other times, he'd bring home a finch that he had preserved in spirits at the scenic studios, and he and Emily would sit side by side in the kitchen sketching it. Both her grandfathers were physicians (one in Germany, the other in Mauritius). Her maternal grandmother was Lotte Pritzel, a well-known sculptor in 1920s Munich, whose erotically charged wax dolls inspired the Dadaists and the surrealist Hans Bellmer. Even the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said that he was moved to write part of his favorite verse, Duineser Elegien, after seeing Pritzel's haunting figurines. Pritzel died in 1952, eight years before Mayer was born. Her flamboyance, however, was legendary. If broad-brimmed hats were in style, Pritzel wore a broader one. She smoked cigarettes in the subway, embarrassing her daughter, whom Pritzel called bourgeois. "The rebelliousness skipped my mother and hit me. I've just been a bit different. I don't like to conform to what's expected," Emily said, raising an eyebrow.
At twelve, Mayer yearned to dig her scalpel into something more exotic than city sparrows and pigeons, so she took a job at Amazon Pets in southeast London, cleaning cages and exercising dogs and sheep. The owner, a falconer and part-time amateur taxidermist, imported amazing creatures that Mayer found incredibly alluring. Soon he taught her how to train an owl to fly to a lure, and he gave her taxidermy lessons. With some convincing, he also gave her his "dead inventory," which she smuggled home and dissected for practice.
Around then, she and a boyfriend went ferreting (hunting) for rabbits at night. They'd trap them in a purse, kill them, and eat them or feed them to the dogs. Mayer is not opposed to hunting for the table, and she has killed marketplace pigeons and rabbits for taxidermy, but she refuses to kill an animal only for taxidermy. The Akeley concept of dispatching the perfect specimen in order to make the perfect mount and then try to resurrect it revolts her. "Just leave it alive!" she says with disgust. She disapproves of fur farms and believes that roadkill is the most ethical meat you can eat. Her own specimens come from veterinarians, zoos, other taxidermists, and a network of obscure specialists, including skeleton assemblers, ornithologists, and lepidopterists. The horse intestines she uses to repair Hirst's Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything (a cow cut up and displayed in twelve separate glass cabinets; 1996) are from John Warman the knacker, whose family has been in the slaughtering business since the early 1800s. And her rats and mice are mostly cat fatalities.
She literally will not kill a fly. Once when I was at her house, she had just made a "blood run" (a resin blood puddle embedded with dead flies) for Hirst's landmark sculpture A Thousand Years (a rotting cow head on the floor of a giant glass case that is outfitted with a bug zapper and real flies, which eventually get sizzled; 1990). When I asked Mayer if she had killed the flies, she shot me a daggerlike look.
At seventeen, Mayer realized that her fascination with dead animals was more than a morbid predilection, perhaps even something of a gift. It was 1977, and she was waiting for the school bus, when she saw a dog get hit by a car and die. She carried the dog to the owners and gently broke the news. They were grateful, and soon Mayer was hanging out with them on their porch, drinking port, smoking pot, and complaining about how bored she was in school. ("I'm a maker of objects; I'm not intellectual," she says.) She wanted to drop out and become a taxidermist. "Do it then! Stop going to school and do it!" said the man, whom she describes as a rebel from a wealthy family. And so she did just that and has never regretted it, although one teacher told her she'd never be a taxidermist without advanced courses in biology and art. "And so I proved her wrong; I refused to be discouraged," she said.
That summer Emily worked as an apprentice taxidermist at World of Nature, in North Yorkshire, a zoo and a private museum housed in a converted mill. There was a window through which the public could watch taxidermy—or, rather, what minimally passed for taxidermy. World of Nature, you see, had the whiff of a circus. The owner was a former strongman who got his animals—including his pet lion, Libra—from his circus world contacts.
At World of Nature, Mayer learned how to skin eyelids, ears, and lips. She discovered, after skinning a rotten tortoise, that she had the requisite strong stomach for the task. Mostly she learned what not to do: break squirrel noses to enhance their cuteness; mount snarling stoats with one arm raised (like a toy); or implant teddy bear eyes in fox faces.
One day after she was told to flesh an elephant with a blunt skinning knife, Mayer quit. She returned to Greenwich for a time, then moved to Norfolk, where she freelanced doing taxidermy for schools and fox-hunt kennels and hung out at the pub with the local plumbers and builders. Then her efforts started to unravel. Glass eyes looked "glassy"; dog noses, dry; cat ears, opaque (when they ought to be translucent). And the faces—the tender windows onto an animal's soul—looked hard, not soft and fleshy. Mayer grew restless; the task of merging art and nature never seemed more illogical or unattainable. So she did something she had always found rather repugnant: she enrolled in art school. There she studied the energy of movement, discovering in sculpture what was missing in her taxidermy: her own interpretation.
It's as natural for a taxidermist to become a sculptor as it is for an actor to direct. Almost inevitably, taxidermists go the way of the nineteenth-century French animaliers (painters or sculptors of animal subjects) and cast animals in bronze. When Carl Akeley, Robert Rockwell, and David Schwendeman (briefly) each took up sculpture, they did bronze casting. To Mayer, however, nothing was more confining than what was essentially metal taxidermy. Until she met Damien Hirst, the only animal sculptures that inspired her were Picasso's assemblages.
Then one day she read about erosion molding. It was taxidermy in reverse: working from the outside of an animal in, dispensing with the derm. She explained the method to me using a dog as an example.
You take one dog, preferably dead, and position it in a way that you want the thing to end up looking. You can do it either fresh or frozen. Small mammals are better to do frozen, because they'll hold their shapes. Then you coat the dog's fur with silicone.
"What about rigor mortis?" I asked.
"It doesn't really last. Otherwise, people would die in really weird shapes, and you wouldn't be able to fit them in coffins, would you?"
After applying the silicone, you bolt a support-jacket mold around the coated carcass so it will hold its shape while the body deco
mposes, or "slips." The idea is to decompose the skin uniformly, so that when you remove the carcass from the mold, you are left with a hollow rubber shell that is the exact duplicate of the animal, with the fur embedded in it. A dog takes about a week to slip. It releases first from the belly, where there is a lot of bacteria. (The bacteria take longer to reach the ears, eyelids, toes, and extremities.) The smell is vile.
Mayer hand-casts every wart and freckle. So if a dog's belly has patches and splotches, she paints them into the mold. If it has one pink toe and three black toes, she casts each toe separately. Quite a bit of chemistry goes into erosion molding, because anytime you alter a batch of silicone resin to change the color, for example, or the tactility (the material's strength), the curing time may also change. Mayer has spent more than a decade fine-tuning the process. She knows how the material will react if changed by a tenth of a gram. "I can't have a piece for Damien discolor in five years," she says. "It has to be archival."
Her first erosion mold, in 1985, was for a pig farmer in Metfield, Suffolk (prime farm country), who wanted the head of his prized Berkshire-Peiron cross mounted as a memento. Mayer wanted to capture its fine details, but a pig's skin, like a primate's, has soft, hairless folds and wrinkles that would show imperfections if mounted conventionally. She suggested erosion molding but warned the farmer that she might "cock up." Mayer rarely cocks up. The pig was fabulous; the farmer was ecstatic. Then Mayer enrolled in art school and forgot all about erosion molding until Damien Hirst hired her to make a replacement severed cow head for A Thousand Years.
That was in 1998, five years after Marco Pierre White introduced them. The first animal Mayer mounted for Hirst was an upright grizzly bear posed in the Victorian style for Last Night I Dreamed That I Didn't Have a Head (Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao). (She used conventional taxidermy because the bear was too huge to erosion mold at that point in her career.) When Hirst went to Norfolk to inspect it, Mayer was expecting him to be "a right jumped-up little asshole that was really up himself." Instead, she found him to be "really straightforward, what you see is what you get kind of thing." While they were drinking beer in the garden, Hirst mentioned a concept similar to one he describes in his book On the Way to Work (2002). Mayer just happened to have a tiny plasticine cow on a cross that she had made, and she took it out to show him. Synchronicity! Hirst yelled, "Fucking hell! Fucking hell!"
Still Life Page 13
