Anthropomorphic Taxidermy is another form of taxidermy and one of my favorites. Anthropomorphic Taxidermy is where stuffed animals are dressed as people or seem to be engaged in human activities. Think of a little girl playing tea party or the White Rabbit from Alice
A lot of artists use taxidermy in their artwork to expose a hidden meaning, a hard truth, to capture the moment between life and death, or to recreate life out of the no-longer living.
Pascal Bernier is an artist who uses taxidermy in his artwork to “portray a world disenchanted with its own lost innocence, a world which is marred by the violence of science, agriculture, and human desires. His work highlights the roles in which we place animals and the fantasies that animals – whether hunted or farmed, taxadermied or cloned – allow us to dream about ourselves.” In his series “Hunting Accidents” Bernier has depicted several animals, including deer, a tiger, lions and a penguin with bandaged heads, legs, and necks. “On the one hand, the idea of carefully bandaging a stuffed polar bear or penguin is playfully absurd, on the other, the act acknowledges irreparable loss – what has been wounded will never in fact recover despite all our best efforts. The bandaged animals could be poster children for environmental doomsayers: mere tattered shells of their former health, soundness, and beauty which have all been irrevocably lost. Ultimately Bernier’s works are about the merciless blindness inherent in human nature.”(ravishingbeasts.com/taxidermy-artists) “... This disenchanted world which has lost the innocence of its ‘paradise’ is what Pascal Bernier now depicts for us as a vast laboratory of violence, where he cynically admits he works “without anaesthetic”.
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