Reid Peppard has a lot in common with The Addams Family, in that she’s creepy, kooky, and altogether ooky, but we think she’s rather wonderful nonetheless. A highly-skilled jewelery and accessory designer, her forte is working with the dead; taxidermy crows become bombastic headpieces, squirrels’ hearts are cast and turned into pendants, and whole mice are hollowed out and converted into purses. Hoping for some grim details, we asked Reid a few questions about the business of turning corpses into couture:
AW: Hello, Reid! Alright, here’s the first question – if you could use any creature in your work, whether extinct, endangered, or mythological, which would it be, and what would you do with it?
RP: If I could work on any creature, and do anything to it, I would build one – maybe two – two person flats in the belly of a blue whale. They are the biggest creatures in the world, and I like the idea of living “in the belly of the beast”. I would use the complete skeleton as part of the structure. I think that would be really amazing.
AW: A kind of modern-day reworking of Jonah and the whale, then? We’ll hold ourselves back from making a Moby Dick joke. Next, from giants to rodents – what’s the tiniest creature you’ve ever worked with, and how exactly does scale affect your working processes?
RP: The tiniest creature I’ve ever worked on would have to be one of the little house mice that my cat Panasonic caught me. I think working on such a small scale is probably harder than working on bigger animals. With this mouse for instance: its skull was so tiny and thin, just de-fleshing/removing the brain etc. takes forever, because you don’t want to break the teeth or skull. You’re working with such precision, on such a small scale – it’s really very time consuming and difficult. I’ve ruined a mouse that’s taken me countless hours to make by applying a single drop of adhesive half a cm too far to the right. ARGH!
AW: Umf! We came over all faint at ‘de-fleshing/removing the brain’. We always thought we were well ‘ard about this kind of stuff, but then recently we found 3/4 of a mouse, still living, on the draining board, and it put the fear of God into us. Do your friends ever save their formerly-living finds for you, assuming they’re still whole?
RP: My friends are constantly on the lookout for dead things for me – just the other day, I had a friend tell me about a dead fox cub on Well Street, with his flatmate texting 4 hours later asking if I wanted a couple of roadkill pheasants from the countryside. I’m lucky to have friends that are so enthusiastic about collecting dead things for me!
AW: That’s touching, we guess, in a creepy way. Just to round things off and leave us all feeling thoroughly ill: Can you recount your goriest job for us? We think we can take it.
RP: Hands down, the most gory experience of my life was skinning the breast feeding squirrel for the Park Collection. Three words for you – no, four: Curdled Milk Cheese Pouches. Oh, wait— five: Green. It took a couple days to get the scent out of my nostrils. Nice!
AW: Nice, indeed. We’re just popping off to be violently sick, now. Thanks, Reid!
RP/Encore’s Park collection is out now. Look out for an Art Wednesday studio visit with Reid Peppard soon.
- RP Encore (Click Here)
- Reid’s Blog (Click Here)
