An interview with Angela Singer

A conversation in two parts, over two shows: Mythily Meher talks to artist and animal rights advocate Angela Singer.

This interview over email and Zoom touches on the array of relationships—abiding and fleeting, with the present and future—that Singer’s work is born of.

Angela Singer, *Deathflash II*, 2021, vintage taxidermy deer head, fluorescent PVC clay, 25 x 9 x 12 cm. Courtesy of the artist and {Suite}

PART 1: Who What Was, {Suite} Wellington, Face to Face Portrait Festival (27–30 May 2021)

Mythily Meher: Let's start by talking about your practice. You are not a taxidermist, however you use discarded taxidermy in your work. Traditionally, as I understand it, taxidermy is kind of a portrait of the human/subject relationship. Is that how you see it too?

Angela Singer: The stories taxidermists tell through taxidermy are varied but ultimately they are about the human relationship with animals and nature. Older museum specimens are animals deliberately killed so others can ‘learn’ about their life, or trophy heads are animals hunted and killed to be displayed, usually in a domestic setting. In other cases, the purpose of taxidermy is unclear.

I imagine that for many taxidermists, there is a desire to hold onto what would have naturally decayed and disappeared into the earth; to present and display the preserved skin as if it were the whole animal and not something new, something else.

Angela Singer, *Under the White (Schenck),* 2021, vintage recycled taxidermy lamb head, hand made porcelain leaves, pearls, jewels, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and {Suite}

And your work subverts this.

I’m interested in telling the story of the animal that was under the skin; seeing the animal’s death, imagining and recalling the living individual; making the absent present.

My subversion, if we can call it that, is about what we cover and what is exposed and what we want to see or not. It’s the taxidermist’s work to conceal evidence of death—bullet holes, cuts, stitches. I expose what has been covered up.

What is the story your exposing tells? What is it a portrait of?

As in portraiture, taxidermy aims for a tasteful likeness of a living subject. I’m interested in showing the lifelessness of the animal, something of the animal’s death that speaks to disappearing animal species and our troubling relationship with the natural world; and our unrelenting assault upon it. The works are memento mori, death masks, mourning portraits; grieving for the animal and for wider ecological loss.

As human animals that loss affects us too. We are part of a deeply interconnected natural world. We don’t want to look at how we have created the epoch of the Anthropocene with our ever-escalating polluting and over-consuming. We don’t want to own that we are the cause of the climate crisis, extinction and destruction of species and ecosystems. If we can acknowledge the part we play at many levels, then we can heal the trauma in ourselves, our homes, our communities, countries and our planet. But we have to be able to look at the problem and see it.

Wow that really situates your work in a total worldview. There is a lot I want to pick up on there. Grief, first. Grief seems to run through your process.

I feel a kind of bereavement-like grief for the individual animal but I’m aware that feeling is connected to grief for the wider loss that we consumers have contributed to, grief for the huge ongoing loss of animal and plant life, grief for all the different kinds of life we have caused to vanish from the planet, grief for those who have died from Covid, one of many zoonotic diseases that’s come out of the meat industry. Grief too for the animals that grieved the loss of this now taxidermy animal—we don’t really acknowledge how wild animals grieve the loss of other animals, there’s this idea that it’s limited to pets grieving the loss of other pets.

There is often surprise around how crows and elephants practice something like funerary rites for their dead. Do you remember several years ago there was that orca mother whose newborn calf died, and she pushed their dead body around the Salish Coast for 17 days. It was devastating, her grief. And a powerful spectacle. I remember somebody on twitter saying she wasn’t just mourning, but also protesting. A dead body is a powerful placard.

I thought it was weird that people were surprised, they were so affected by the footage, ‘cause, you know, we saw a grieving mother carrying the weight of her dead baby for 17 days! I remember some backlash in the media about “anthropomorphising the orca,” but I think we understand grief when we see it, in any animal, including ourselves.

Oh, absolutely.

I think there’s a growing number of people feeling a low hum ecological-grief, climate grief, eco-anxiety about what we have lost and where we are heading.

This makes me imagine that your process of taking apart and re-crafting these taxidermies is something kind of ceremonial, an act of private mourning. Is that how it is?

There’s a definite difference in how I handle the mixed media materials I use and the vintage taxidermy, even in how I store them. I’m very aware that taxidermy is part of an animal, one that wanted to live and is dead. I’m respectful. It does feel a little ceremonial to prepare a clean space, then to clean the taxidermy after removing it from storage, and to prop it up on pillows as if it needs to be comfortable.

The story, then, emerges from the animal’s body and your knowledge about their death. I’d love to hear about how this is realised aesthetically, artistically. What kind of a labour is it? Does your use of certain media/materials precede working with taxidermy, or is a part of your practice apart from it?

I work in ceramic, wax, mixed media sculpture, and tapestry; and have done for over 30 years. I’ve incorporated vintage taxidermy into some of my art for the past 25.

The mixed media I use with taxidermy is either hand-sculpted by me, or it might be [made up of] found vintage jewels, beads, vintage cemetery flowers, teeth, vintage glass eyes etc. The materials are chosen or created during the making process. When I work on a piece where I know something about the death of the animal, I choose materials that I feel best represent some aspect of this.

Talk me through how you learn the backgrounds of many of the stuffed animals that find their way to you. Is it quite a research process?

Most of the taxidermy donated to me is trophy kill. I ask for information on the death—who hunted the animal, how was the animal killed. I record this in my ‘death book’ and number and tag which story belongs to which taxidermy animal.

From the mid-1990s, I advertised in the local Hawke’s Bay newspaper for old and unwanted, damaged, taxidermy (I later advertised in Dunedin and Wellington). Word of mouth now brings donations.

I found myself quite haunted by Velveteen and the ‘Deathflash’ series in this show. Their sheet-ghost appearance is a bit comical, but the glimpses of rabbit lash and furry muzzles are poignant, sad. What are the stories of these animals' deaths?

Here, Angela shares notes copied from her Deathbook.

Angela Singer, *Deathflash I*, 2021 ,vintage taxidermy deer head, fluorescent PVC clay, 22 x 10 x 15 cm. Courtesy of the artist and {Suite}

Deathflash (deathbook notes)
A hunter responded to my newspaper ad for old, unwanted, taxidermy for use in artwork concerning the animal human relationship. I was invited to his home to choose some of his older, damaged taxidermy. He had a room full of taxidermy fawns, at least 40 or more. Some were very small and posed, curled foetal on slabs of rimu; a group of larger fawns were frozen mid-leap on plastic grass, over plastic ferns. He asked me if I was an “animal rights nutter.” I said I was. He told me deer need to be shot to save the land. I told him that controlling fertility was more humane. He said he was a great shot, bad shots were inhumane. He said I was welcome to take a box of vintage fawns and a box of damaged fawns. Stacked like a Jenga tower. Four and five digit taxidermy business phone numbers stamped on the wooden bases. They were his father’s and grandfather’s kills. No space for them anymore. I asked him if he also killed baby deer. Yes. Why? Because he had shot the mothers and didn’t want the fawns to starve. He could tell they weren’t weaned because they waited close-by for the mother’s return. Twin fawns are common. And the really small taxidermy fawns? Cut from the wombs of pregnant doe. He couldn’t tell they were pregnant. If he had known would he still have shot them? Yes…probably. Would he like to see the art work I would make using the fawns? No.

Deathflash II (notes accompanying artwork)
The fluorescent clay-covered deer heads glow phosphorescent green in the dark. Twin fawns veiled under bright sunlit branches. Waiting to nurse. Pressed together, curled close, in unison instinctively motionless at predator's footfall. The fluorescence of the clay slowly fades like a deathflash; the strong burst of radiation all living organisms emit when they die, the intensity and duration of which is linked to the rate of dying.

Angela Singer, *Velveteen,* 2021, vintage taxidermy rabbit head & PVC clay, 12 x 7 x 8 cm. Courtesy of the artist and {Suite}

Velveteen (deathbook notes)
A woman responded to my newspaper ad for old, unwanted, taxidermy for use in artwork concerning the animal human relationship. I’ve lots of stuffed bunnies she said, left by an ex. I went to her home and was directed to a garage, stacked high with boxes and garbage bags. Take what you like, she said. It’s all off to the dump tomorrow. Where are the taxidermy rabbits? There, she said, see the feet? Little grey furry legs poking through the side of a rubbish bag. How many? A few, six or seven. Did your ex shoot them? Yes, he’s shot thousands. How did he choose which ones to taxidermy? Who knows! Did you go hunting with him? Yes once. Bloody cold waiting for dawn in the dark. Had a go but I’m not into it. So you missed? I wasn’t trying. Got it by a fluke. They hear you, ears up, zig zag for cover, almost made it, eyes were shining like pink lights…bloody pests but you feel a bit sorry for them. Is one of the taxidermy rabbits that rabbit? Yes, one of them. Would you like to see what I make with the rabbits? If you like.

Velveteen (notes accompanying artwork)
Holding-still in the grass, lit by the last crepuscular rays. Footfall on leaves. Spooked rabbit, zig-zags to cover, betrayed by pink eye-shine under hunter's spotlight.

I love these. The scenes they conjure! Your exchanges with these donors are almost awkward; the conversations were uncomfortable for me to read, as if hovering at the edge of confrontation.

Well it’s interesting to me that I receive vintage taxidermy from hunters and taxidermists, because there can be this tension where I’m perceived as an enemy yet they are contributing to my art. I know they sometimes suspect that my “seeking damaged taxidermy for artwork” is a ruse and that I’m really coming to their home to mess with them. I do wonder why they donate to me, I guess hunters and taxidermists have the same problems as those who inherit taxidermy from family do—what to do with an old damaged stuffed animal when you value it too much to throw it in the bin.

When I turn up to collect the taxidermy I’m sometimes greeted by the hunter and a group of his male friends, a couple of times ‘cleaning’ their rifles! They usually make themselves busy elsewhere once they see it’s just me, or sometimes just me and my partner. It’s a bit unnerving but after years of these interactions it’s pretty much what I’ve come to expect. Because I’m not what they expect, defences drop and we usually have a back and forth about the dead animal’s back story. I sense that the interest I take is appreciated; maybe they don’t get to talk about the animals they’ve killed very often.

I’m sometimes asked what I might make from their taxidermy, and while I can’t say what the work will look like, they get that I’m interested in the taxidermy as a body and not as a stuffed fur or feather object.

After exchanging our views on conservation, hunting, the meat industry, animal rights, veganism etc, we agree to disagree.

I doubt I could make art in this way, get this kind of access, if I wasn't a gender conforming white woman.

Wait—are you saying that a lot of the people you collect from are gender-conforming and white? I mean, it is interesting to me if stuffed trophy kills—arguably an art form in their own right—are circulating within specific social strata, even as they are being transformed/reformed…

Trophy hunters are overwhelmingly white, male, macho, reasonably well off. That’s not only my experience and perception, research on the subject shows it’s the ‘sport’ of predominantly white men with plenty of disposable income. Getting a stag taxidermied isn’t cheap. So yes, it does seem to be mainly white men hunting ‘dangerous’ large animals, objectifying and marginalising the animal body, to prove their powerfulness.

Can you tell me a bit about who buys your art, and the ‘lives’ the works go on to have?

I think, like most artists, I don’t know who buys the majority of my art once it goes to the gallery I’ve said my goodbyes.I like to imagine that whoever views it will think about the dead animal—how and why it died.

Part 2: Zzzooonotic, {Suite} Wellington (3–27 November 2021)

Mythily Meher: So, Zzzooonotic was initially destined for Auckland's {Suite} gallery, in August, and then…

Angela Singer: It should have been in the Auckland gallery! Because of the lockdown, we kept moving the dates. It's not a huge gallery. Because of the plinths we were installing in the space, it might have been hard to socially distance.

My partner, Daniel [Unverricht], was meant to have his exhibition directly afterwards [at {Suite} in Auckland]. So we thought, should we just do it in Wellington, and both exhibit less work. We'll still show in Auckland in June 2022, unless the traffic lights go red, and then not!

Daniel Unverricht and Angela Singer, Zzzooonotic. Installation view, {Suite}, November 2021. Courtesy of the artist and {Suite}

Ah so, Daniel's your partner. Was it easy, then, to install together, and think about sharing the space?

Yes, 25 years together this month. Install was easy as Daniel has worked part time for McLeavey Gallery for many years, so he was able to match [the works]. He has a painting that has a lot of green in it, with plants and rough wood and a broken window. And so that went near my green trees. And he has a painting that has a lot of blue light, which has a relationship with my blue tree sculpture. So those ones went together. The ghost cats are installed in the centre, they're all white; and then he has night paintings near them, visually, white on black...It actually looks like we planned to show together.

He doesn't usually paint animals, he's usually got suburban or industrial night scenes in his paintings, but he has a dog in his work Caesar, inspired by going for a walk during level four lockdown when there was no one on the streets except this dog. He was like, oh, what's that movement over there—because there was nothing, it was so still—and it was a pit bull sniffing a pole. So he quickly took a photo and thought, I'm gonna paint that. Good to have an animal connection in the show.

I liked seeing more of the sheet ghosts in this exhibition. I liked the way these were very evocative, but there was this comedic aspect that was also tragic. It was confusing in an engaging, compelling way. Can I ask you about that punchy pop-ghost aesthetic?

They are kind of tragic-comic, but I think there's real darkness in the best comedy. I'm attracted to the stuff that is funny, but on an underlying level, it’s a gut punch as well. Maybe that's why there are so many super depressed comics, I don't know.

And who are these artworks a conversation with, ideally?

In my ideal world, they're a conversation with everyone. Because everybody is affected by COVID. It’s a time when we should all be thinking about these zoonotic diseases, and the fact that these viruses aren’t going to go away if we don’t change our practices with how we are around animals, how we're breeding animals, and our interactions with animals.

Around that, I want to ask how your artistry sits in relation to your advocacy and activism. Bearing in mind that there might not be a clear reconciliation between them at all…

It's interesting because in the early 1990s in Melbourne I was studying evenings at Vic and making ceramic sculptures that were not consciously connected to my concern for animal rights. I went from being an animal advocate doing on the ground advocacy, volunteering for Animal Liberation,, to just being very frustrated. Quite often you're preaching to the choir. There'd be a few wins where you felt like you were getting through to who you wanted, but I'd say that, on the whole, it felt like there needed to be a different way of reaching people. When I became a full-time artist, I decided to bring something I'm passionate about into my art, and it began to make sense.

I can remember a couple years ago, I was doing a talk at the Australasian Animal Studies Association conference, and one of the animal advocates from the States was there. She came up and said, “I love your work. I love that it's a way of reaching people who are going to art galleries. We are [usually] not able to get them to see the urgency around our relationship with animals.” And I said, “I don't think it's enough!,” as you never feel that it is. But she said, “No, this is a different way, it's more subtle. It may be a different kind of change that takes place in someone who sees the work, and perhaps has a visceral response to it.”

Change takes many forms. I guess what makes me a little sad is that there aren't more artists who are looking at that human-animal relationship from a perspective of, not just the rights of the animal, but the animal perspective.

Yeah. Are there artists or makers who are doing work that you admire or want to mention?

Sue Coe does illustration and prints. She's done a whole series of works over her five decade career around the exploitation of animals and abuses of power. She grew up, I think, next to a pig farm or a slaughterhouse. And she goes into slaughterhouses and documents, and she draws, and she makes a comparison with other tragic events in the world. And she's had some, you know, recognition as a political artist, including a great solo show at MOMA a couple of years ago, but probably not as much as the art world could have given her, or could still give, her work.

This is a bit of a sweeping remark, but I feel like the art world is still a little allergic to politics?

Um yes. I would say so. [Laughs.] All kinds of politics. I think you can make an artwork that is political, and it can still be an artwork. It doesn't have to be didactic. And yet, I think there's this kind of pushback like, “oh, no, no, you've got an agenda. This is not an artwork.”

Right? Remember when we were first talking, I asked you what has it been like, socially, to wear your politics and ethics on your career sleeve? And you said, so simply and beautifully [laughing], “It's like living on Tatooine!”

[Laughs.] It's a chilly place. It's remote. And it's not really what people want to talk about, especially not at openings. The number of openings I've gone to where little sausage rolls and whatnot are served, and someone asks me what informs my work whilst waving a little sausage in my face...[laughs] no, I'm not going to go on a vegan rant or anything to anyone, but I do want to talk about my practice.

If you ask what the work’s about, why would you not be happy to hear what it's about? Some people are very defensive, like, “A-ha!, you're accusing me!” But I'm not. I'm saying, “this is what I'm doing.” I'm not perfect. It is very, very hard to live in this world and not partake of some form of suffering on some level. But certainly, I'm trying. And that's what I'd like to see, is more people trying. Or even be conscious that they aren't.

I think the thing about trying is… I like myself more when I try. But very often, I don't try. I think that's okay, too, because on some level, I'm sort of against purity. Against the idea that there can be purity. We live in a tension between the efforts you make at an individual level, and the recognition that we are hopelessly entangled in all sorts of things that we wouldn't want to be part of if we could choose. Keeping the world out of our bodies and the bodies of others, is just not possible, everything’s connected. Let's talk about the works in the show that have the bird heads turning into trees, the “Ecotopia” series.

There’s definitely a connection. When we look at our relationship with animals, we can’t separate that from what we're doing to the planet, and how that's affecting the climate and how that's affecting the animals as well as us. We forget we're animals too.

There’s a link to the zoonotic diseases in the clearing of the land, and the taking off of wild animals; or forcing wild animals into closer contact with human beings. Land becomes farmland, which then puts a whole bunch of animals in close contact with humans [in an entirely new way].

We humans have really messed with animals’ lives. Only 4% of the biomass of mammals on the earth are wild animals, 60% are domesticated animals (a majority chickens). And with this change there’s movement, transmission, this spillage or spill-back, of those diseases.

Those trees, my mutated looking ceramic trees, what's coming out of them is PVC plastic that I've used to make the leaves, and then there’s birds that emerge from within. We all now have plastic in us. New born babies have microplastic in their first poo! There are micro nano plastic particles in the rain, we can't escape it. It's part of us. We have all these increases in disease and we wonder why. Grim, isn't it!

Angela Singer, *Ecotopia*, 2021, vintage taxidermy bird head, glazed ceramic, mixed media, 32 x 26 x 15 cm. Courtesy of the artist and {Suite}

As you say, the sooner we acknowledge that, we'll be in a better place to “live as well as we can in the ruins,” as this scholar I like, Anna Tsing, puts it. I wonder, when you were deeper in what you call “on the ground activism,” were you targeting corporations that do a larger percentage of the damage, rather than individual practices?

A long time ago, in the early ‘90s, I was involved with direct action campaigns [as volunteer marketing manager for the Vivisection campaign, Animal Liberation Victoria]. Some of our work focussed on organisations such as testing labs and those that were transporting wild animals for testing. There were successes. [We helped stop] the transportation of some of the monkeys whose eyes were being used in tests for the lenses used in Ray Ban sunglasses. There was a huge march that went through the main streets of Melbourne, publicised on the news programmes. The philosopher Peter Singer and his family were at the head of it. When bystanders saw the pictures on the placards, and saw that Lufthansa was transporting these wild animals, they joined in; and by the time we got to where we were going, it was the most enormous crowd. Soon, Lufthansa announced they would no longer transport the monkeys. [This kind of work] was good in that you got direct feedback from people, like, “I'm not going to buy that company's product until I see change.”

When these kinds of issues inform art, however, there is not necessarily a direct connection. And I resist having stacks of information. I tried that on my first couple of shows, I had some info from animal groups there. But it detracts from understanding the art, and from having a one on one experience with that art—from being able to experience it in a way that actually might, on some level, create a connection, which might create some form of change.

And I guess as well, it could not carry people through to any of that, and that would be fine, too.

That's right. And then it exists as an artwork that has whatever meaning it has to that person. I can only hope it's working on subtle levels. But who knows? Maybe not, maybe they just think it's super funny. I don't know.

Doing this kind of political art, it’s not the most fashionable. If this [interview] gets someone thinking about their own art practice, and what they really care about—whatever that may be—and start to put that into their art, that’s a win.

An interview with Angela Singer

RELATED READING

promising.space

A conversation between Bronte Perry and Daniel John Corbett Sanders