Artist uses taxidermist skills to make hybrid art

CONTEMPORARY artists often use unlikely materials in their work. Arlene McPadden is no exception: the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology graduate turned to taxidermy in her last year in college, creating artworks from stuffed wild animals.

Some of these can now be seen in the annual selected graduates’ exhibition work at the Sarah Walker Gallery on the pier in Castletownbere.

McPadden decided to study taxidermy after chancing on a petrified stoat while out walking with her mother. She trained with a professional taxidermist. “It was hard to work with dead animals at the start,” she says, “but that passed very quickly once I had seen what the results are like. I had some bad days where I nearly cried over things — I did actually cry over some of the animals — but I kept going. It’s a passion that has come out of nowhere.”