Sofia Leilani Kugelberg

Trophy Room

Shed-sized

Particle board, inkjet prints, polyurethane foam, LEDs, wood veneer tiles, found objects, feathers

2023

Hunting trophies are their maker’s imposition of immobility onto the living animal. By killing, stuffing and sewing a creature, you are reducing it to its image, or its objecthood. 

Taxidermy is the most desperate attempt at the celebration of the beauty of nature. The animals are visually attractive and posed, and are trying their hardest to not appear as dead as they are.

When taxidermy is botched, the results are animals that are fractured, off-kilter, haphazardly made, and wrong. One does not perceive the immaculacy of the living creature, one perceives an animal wronged. 

Botching is an experimental procedure. By purposefully botching, one can reap the inspirations of error. Error obscures image which obscures object which obscures dead which obscures living. 

The oldest mounted taxidermy specimen still intact today is an African gray parrot.