Artist Statement

All of my work has been inspired by my photographic images of found dead animals. Initially, these served to highlight the beauty of these creatures in making a type of memento mori to their passing, but mostly it was simply a way of preserving them, much in the same way as Taxidermy does. The embalming nature (Barthes, Camera Lucida) of photography was ideal for this type of preservation and capturing the beauty and tragedy of death became a way of keeping the subjects alive. Conveniently, Taxidermy and photography are both about surface appearance, death and preservation – albeit a strange preservation in which the subject is no longer really present.

I hoped to demonstrate the similarities between animal and human life; that under the skin, fur or scales we are all similarly alive and sentient. The resulting images are sometimes beautiful, occasionally dark and macabre and a few come close to what I sought to achieve.

Max Kimber