Stuffing and Nonsense

Ethical taxidermist Bunny Lane creates a carnival of the animals

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A sleek water creature rests on a gold-fringed velvet base: this is, of course, an otterman, the elegantly high-concept footstool no home should be without. One opossum rides a horned rabbit; another, modesty preserved by the briefest of sequined costumes, slinks sensually down a pole. A half-done flying squirrel, delicate and nearly perfect except for a cat-made hole in one gliding flap, waits patiently to fly again—he’s been promised a cape. The animals and countless more, from adventurous muskrats to angelic rabbits, are the work of taxidermy artist Bunny Lane.

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In her studio in Carriere, Mississippi, Lane adapts traditional taxidermy techniques to her modern, fun-loving artistic vision, giving roadkill exciting reincarnations as saints and circus performers. Lane is part of a new generation of taxidermists, often female and almost universally gleefully weird, who use animals and animal products as a medium for broader aesthetic goals. These aren’t your father’s deer heads. 

She casually mentions “guts hanging out” with the same, “eh, you know, work is work” tone we office drones use for overflowing inboxes.

Lane sources her animals ethically, using specimens that have died, if not naturally, at least in the ways animals die in the country. She relies heavily on roadkill and the body count produced by her cats, and made her bones practicing with rabbit skins discarded by a man who raised the animals for food. (This experience has made her enjoy working with rabbits more than many of her peers do; the paper-thin skin and need to get the ears propped up can both cause challenges.) Some neighbors called when their goat delivered a stillbirth, and others call when they see a carcass worth salvaging: “There’s a raccoon out by the Family Dollar!” Lane has to move quickly when she finds an animal she wants to preserve, since Mississippi heat encourages busy insects and natural decay, but she can do a lot with an individual a non-taxidermist might see as a lost cause—she casually mentions “guts hanging out” with the same, “eh, you know, work is work” tone we office drones use for overflowing inboxes.

Finding the animal and getting it into the freezer to preserve it and ice any wistfully lingering ticks is the first step, after which Lane makes a provisional plan and skins the animal. While fur will hide stitching in many cases, it’s still preferable to have the incision on a part of the animal that isn’t pointed at the viewer—a flying bobcat, awaiting the addition of wings and planned to hang from the ceiling, was opened from the back, since most viewers will see the sides and belly when it’s installed. The skinning is easy, with Lane referring to it as “just like taking off their clothes.” The animal’s extraneous interior goes out to the pond behind the house, where a colony of tame-ish turtles are growing contently fat on a diet of hand-delivered offal. The skin is then coated in borax—“I hate to say it’s like making fried chicken and shaking it to get coated, but it is”—then into a box to let the borax leach out the moisture. Later, Lane will scrape off any clinging fat, dust the mineral powder out of the fur, and begin.

Today, she demonstrates the first steps of her work on a squirrel, emptied and boraxed and ready to be reborn. Pre-made forms are available, but Lane prefers to make her own, enjoying both the hands-on craftwork and the versatility: “You can buy a form of a squirrel holding a nut—how boring—but if you want to make a wildcat look like Little Richard you have to do it yourself.”

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She bundles a mass of raffia-like long wood shavings—called excelsior—together, tying it with twine until it has the right balance of mass and give to fill out the torso. Next, she takes a premade Styrofoam head form—she can cast her own in wax for something special, but doesn’t always need to—and uses a little power drill to carve the orbits of the eyes and tweak the overall shape. She adds glass eyes (available from a special taxidermists’ catalogue!) and smooths a special clay over areas of the “skull” in a process that recalls facial reconstructions on true crime shows. The clay will air-dry completely but not rapidly, giving Lane time to work while ultimately leading to a lasting product. 

Lane is so enamored of the jackalope, the mythical antler-bearing rabbit of the American West, that her business cards bill her as “the Jackalope Queen,” so her Fiji Mermaid dispenses with the monkey in favor of a jackalope’s front half.

Lane then builds out the animal’s limbs and tail with more clay and wire, which gives the fullness of flesh while preserving flexibility as she develops the piece, before inserting the Styrofoam “skull.” The wood-straw form is lightly painted with a particular glue—which like the clay will air-dry and encourage the skin around it to dry as well—then set into place in the empty skin of the torso. “We’ll get his clothes back on,” says Lane. She sews up the belly with quick stiches to hold it so she can show us how she has to pin the face to keep it from looking creepy. Since skin will inevitably dry at different rates, you have to pin the eyelids, lips, cheeks, and so forth to keep them attached to the glue on the form and prevent them from shrinking away, cursing the critter with a lopsided, zombie-like leer. She can return to it later to fine-tune the arrangement and posture before adding garments and accessories to complete the artwork—many of which she makes herself.

Lane shares her home with the aforementioned cats, a wonderfully effusive mop of a dog named Deuce, and her own take on a Fiji Mermaid. Fiji Mermaids emerged as a Victorian-era pseudonaturalist’s hoax made out of half a shaved monkey and a fish tail, displayed by PT Barnum and others as “evidence” of the existence of mermaids and, apparently, the human desire to find interesting things, kill them, and show them around. Even the cryptids come with a twist around here; Lane is so enamored of the jackalope, the mythical antler-bearing rabbit of the American West, that her business cards bill her as “the Jackalope Queen,” so her Fiji Mermaid dispenses with the monkey in favor of a jackalope’s front half. This mythic mashup rests majestically in her living room awaiting incorporation into a future tourist-trap style curiosities attraction, to be called “the Grotto of the Fiji Mermaid and UFO Welcome Center.”

Lane grew up in Illinois, but she’s adapted with gusto to one of the most pleasant rural Southern traditions: sending visitors home with fresh garden tomatoes, fat from sun and rain. As I leave, I repeatedly ask Lane to tell me when she has an opening date for the roadside attraction (she estimates four years, but I still want to be in the know) and remind her that I will be the first to sign up for her beginning taxidermy workshop, tentatively scheduled for fall, as soon as she nails down a date. She has built a magical place in her corner of Mississippi, and I’ll seize any chance to come back.  

You can find Bunny Lane Taxidermy on Facebook and Instagram, through which she sometimes sells her work; she also often displays her creations at Red Truck Gallery in New Orleans.