Outside of fairy tales, animals don’t talk.
But local artist Nicole Morris is doing her best to speak for them in death.
Morris curated “bone, a collective study,” a hybrid art gallery at The Bends bar in St. Petersburg that ran for the first half of February. Her animal rights taxidermy pieces were central to the display.
Morris has only been working with bones as a medium for a little over a year. Prior to that she mainly drew and painted. It was something good that came out of a negative situation.
About a year and a half ago, Morris’ daughter became ill and she was forced to become a stay-at-home mom. One day, a black heron dropped dead in her yard. It eventually decomposed. She has a degree in massage therapy from Aveda that included some knowledge of human anatomy and body systems. She also has an arts degree she earned while living in New York. When she looked at the bird’s skeleton, something clicked.
“I started to mesh and combine the two degrees and taxidermy just fell into place from there,” Morris said. “When it came to actually skinning an animal I knew where I needed to and where I didn’t need to.”
Sometime before seeing the fateful bird, she had visited the home and studios of Ryan Matthew Cohn, a friend from New York who makes anatomical models. He is a co-star on the Science Channel show “Oddities.”
“That’s how I got introduced to the whole thing, period,” Morris said. “He takes actual human skulls, dissects them and retracts them with wires and gears.”
Most important of all to Morris is the storytelling aspect of her pieces — and she makes sure it is a story that the animal in question would be okay with.
“I’m doing all animal rights taxidermy,” Morris said. “I don’t dress them in clothes, and I put them in natural forms. They’re doing very weird things, like holding their own broken tail, or coming out of a bear trap looking pissed. When you look at taxidermy as an illustration art form, it’s all about how you build your basins, and what your story is, and then how you execute.”
Besides the bones themselves, the environment they are placed in is essential to the story. Local metal artist Frank Strunk designs most of the fixtures for Morris’ creations.
“I could sit here and have the squirrel in my hand but it’s not going to look as cool as it does chilling in that nice steel box,” Morris said.
The showing at The Bends is Morris’ first public display of her work. It was a new experience for several of the other artists involved, as well. The reception was positive. A man from Pennsylvania bought a piece featuring a squirrel the first day of the show and had it shipped back to his home state.
“He had to have it, right then,” Morris said. “It’s that kind of enthusiasm that is exciting to see as an artist.”
Now that “bone” has run its course at The Bends, they will try to find a more traditional galley to place it in.
Morris has made bone art full-time for more than a year. She plans to go back to school in August, though, this time to study electroneurodiagnostics at Erwin Technical Center in Tampa.
In whatever she does, Morris tries to keep in mind that there are no limits.
“I do everything in the arts world,” she said. “There’s no can’ts in art.”
Morris’ work can be seen at etsy.com/shop/bonejewelrybynicol.
Note: This article was amended from a previous version to protect the identity of a minor.
