Bone Art: Jessica Joslin

There's a great interview with artist Jessica Joslin over at Hi Fructose magazine. Here's a little snippet that really struck me, though I encourage you to read the whole thing:

There is a strange intimacy in working with bones, and there are often tangible tales about the animal's life embedded within. I know whether it died young or old, if it had arthritis or parasites, if it had broken a bone and if so, how long ago and whether it would have limped. It might have bits of shrapnel embedded, with the bone grown up around it like a pearl--that tells me that it had a run-in with a hunter and survived. Fellini once said, “The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.” If you know how to read them, bones are an animal's autobiography.

On my list of artists whose work I would like to own if I became suddenly wealthy, Joslin is pretty close to the top. I could imagine a crazy Victorian house filed with her sculptures (though actually I want a Craftsman house some day).

She's also got a gorgeous new website with many, many pictures of her work. Looking through them all, I really wished for a nice, heavy art book that I could flip through on my couch. And look, there is a book! I'll have to save my pennies and buy a copy.

Oddities

Last night I was finally able to catch a couple of episodes of the Discovery Channel show Oddities (I'm in Canada, and US shows, if we get them at all, usually get here much later). It's a lot like Pawn Stars or American Pickers--in fact, even the wording of some of the commentary is so similar it made me wonder if they're using the same writers--but set in an antique shop that caters to collectors of, well, oddities.

Aside from being a total blast for anyone interested in weird stuff, there was a lot for a bone collector (or other skelephile) to love. There are plenty of skulls and jarred specimens in the background, and one of the episodes I watched featured the skull collections (mostly human) of one of the employees and his rival, a chiropractor and regular customer. Said employee (my apologies--I haven't got their names stuck in my brain yet) also constructed a Beauchene (or "exploded") skull from a disarticulated skull that his rival/friend brought in.

Very cool. And both skull collectors had fantastic shelving, too! I want those glass-fronted cases for my collection. And for my books. So check it out, and have a look at the website, too, it'll give you a taste of the show, and there are some neat exclusives.

My only quibble is that the episodes are only a half hour each, so there's no real time to delve into the history and background of the objects, or the lives of the proprietors and their colourful cast of customers. Still, an excellent show, and one I might even pick up on DVD if it gets a release.

Skull image copyright Niko Silvester. Please don't use without permission, thanks.

Taxidermy in Art

There's a great post on taxidermy in art over at Dr InSectus's Cabinet of Curiosities. The art of Ron Pippin, Jessica Joslin and Rosamond Purcell are all covered (with pictures!), and the work is just beautiful. I was already familiar with all three artists, but there were a few images here I hadn't seen. I'm especially fond of the work of Rosamond Purcell (who I'm also a fan of on Facebook). I've got a couple of her books, which I'll probably talk about in later posts, and I'm working on a triptych of linoprints based on one of her photographs of fossils. (OK, sometimes I secretly want to be Rosamond Purcell, except mostly I'm too fond of being myself.)

Some of this is the kind of work I can imagine myself doing, if I had more tools and more skills. Lately I'm imagining mounted and posed cow skeletons lurking in the bushes around my 5 acres. I know where to get the skeletons, too. Maybe this summer I'll get ambitious and learn how to mount them. If BillyZee will let me fill our property with skeletal cows. He might not like that.