A Different Kind of Animal Lover

Published in Curve Magazine
Story by Kristin A. Smith
Photographs by Molly Decoudreaux



Tia Resleure’s apartment is filled to the brim with animals. There are dogs, pigeons, monkeys, goats and a dray of squirrels on the table. Two slight Italian greyhounds dance around the house, while another sits motionless…mounted on the wall.

“I don’t have a problem decorating my house with taxidermy; I think it’s beautiful,” says Resleure (pronounced ray-LURE), who sits on a chaise lounge, stroking her dog’s ear.

Resleure’s tattooed arms point at her favorite pieces—Flora and Fauna, the two-headed lamb encased in glass, and the four-legged piglet with strangely sweet eyes. “It’s gotten to be that albinos have become passé for me,” she says, lighting another cigarette.

Resleure has an extensive collection of Victorian and Edwardian taxidermy, as well as an expanding portfolio of her own work (acaseofcuriosities.com).

The entryway to her San Francisco apartment holds one of Resleure’s “diva-pigeons,” a series she is working on. The white pigeon, with its cocked head and downward gaze, is in stark contrast to the blue silk gown that envelops it. “Taxidermy for me, is like playing with dolls,” she says.

Resleure is one of a growing number of women involved in taxidermy. From the traditional taxidermists, mounting their husband’s hunting trophies in the basement, to the art kids tattooing animal hides in studios, taxidermy is gaining popularity among women. “It’s going through a real renaissance right now,” says Resleure. “There are a lot of young pups coming up in the art world.”

One of these young pups is a San Francisco artist named Maya Bookbinder. Bookbinder, whose day job is actually binding books, began her love of taxidermy in the nature lab at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). “I was doing taxidermy repair work and then I just got kind of obsessed,” says the 23-year-old art school graduate.

Bookbinder’s obsession first led her to the home of Jan Van Hoesen, an award-winning competitive taxidermist. It was there that in addition to caring for Van Hoesen bobcats, she learned to stuff coyote, ground hog and other small mammals. “It was an amazing experience,” says Bookbinder.

While Van Hoesen taught Bookbinder the basics of taxidermy, it was all within the constructs of traditional work and was a far cry from the art dreams—including robotic taxidermy—of the RISD graduate. “The two worlds are just so separate,” says Bookbinder. “There really isn’t much overlap.”

So Bookbinder came to San Francisco to study with Resleure. Under Resleure’s instruction, she learned to work with Italian Greyhounds, one of the more difficult animals to stuff.

“Italian Greyhounds are so hard to do, because you can see everything,” says Resleure, pointing at the thin-faced dog on the wall. As if to reinforce the point, one of her Italian Greyhounds walks by, shaking its veiny legs.

Resleure has a fondness for animals—both living and dead. “A lot of people have said that I’m insensitive to animals, but I love them,” she says.

She even started an Italian Greyhound rescue because the existing San Francisco one “was filled with an idiot volunteer core” who didn’t know how to care for the animals. Twenty-two dogs have come through Resleure’s door in the last two years. She says that most taxidermists have a profound love for animals and it is that love that helps them to create beautiful pieces.

It was Resleure’s connection to animals that brought her to taxidermy in the first place. Growing up in a severely dysfunctional home, she turned to animals to escape the world of abuse. “The dogs were the only people who listened to me,” she says, laughing. The one connection her family shared was their love of nature—her parents loved natural history and her grandfather had a vast taxidermy collection of his own.

Resleure says that her favorite book as a child was the Big Golden Book of Fairytales, which centers on anthropomorphic characters. “That’s sort of what my collection feels likes,” she says, gesturing at the diorama of sword-fighting frogs in pirate shirts.

Resleure returns to Aissi, the Italian Greyhound mounted on the wall—It was her first greyhound mount and a pet she loved dearly. She stares at the face and says, “you can’t put the dog’s spirit in it…I look at this and I see a beautiful animal, but I don’t see my dog.”

Resleure usually doesn’t do mounts of other people’s pets, and she doesn’t use any endangered species. “I think about the ethics of what I do a lot,” she says.

But Resleure, like many taxidermists, has come under sharp attack from animal rights activists. “They say that I’m going to burn in hell,” she says, adding that their posters of animals are more gruesome than anything she has seen.

Bookbinder also contemplates the morals of her work. A vegan for some time, she understands people’s aversions to dead animals, but says she “just [doesn’t] have the baggage about it that some people do.” She adds that the first time she cut into an animal, “it felt really natural.”

Neither Resleure nor Bookbinder are hunters, so they get their animals in other ways—road kill, donations, purchases or pets that have died. “People used to bring road kill to my door. It’s really just recycling,” says Bookbinder. But her San Francisco apartment is too small to stuff big animals; she mostly works with pelts now.

Resleure and Bookbinder both have big dreams for their taxidermy careers. “I’d love to get a hold of a turkey and work on it,” says Bookbinder, excitedly. “Yeah, I’d love to learn to do birds.”

“I’d like to do the best Italian Greyhound mount in the world, better than the one in the British museum,” says Resleure. For now, she keeps repairing her collection of oddities and dreams of opening a bar to house her collection--perhapa a Victorian one with Flora and Fauna sitting on a table and Aissi, her loyal dog, by her side.