Black Throated Magpie Jay (and mouse)

This is a piece I created as an original work, exhibited at the 2019 New England Taxidermy Championships where it won Best of Category in the Professional division for both Birds and Mammals. My intent was to portray the meeting of predator and prey, with a tenderness and inquisitive nuance. The brass ring is a recurring theme in my work, symbolic of a window on nature or a halo exalting it. Taxidermy itself contains a bit of the human idealization of nature, the ring is a physical and symbolic frame, calling to mind the boundaries that exist not just between what is natural and unnatural, but lines and borders in a broad sense.