Everything around Jo Lepeska is dead. The vase of flowers, dry and fragile, on a side table. The myth-sized insects collaging the wall. The Albertan coyote staring blankly in the corner, the stuffed goose that dangles from the ceiling. Mounted on the wall is the head of a stag. Next to the skeleton of some unidentifiable animal, anthropomorphically taxidermied rats in fisticuffs adorn the shelves.

“As a taxidermist, I’m only interested in the skin. I’m not interested in what’s inside.” From behind her desk, Lepeska smiles at me, swathed in a grey leopard-print sweater, her blond hair in a messy updo. What appear to be feather earrings dangle from her lobes.

The epidermis of all mammals, she explains, is attached to the body at the same points: ears, eyes, nose, mouth, genitalia. “I’m literally removing the jacket the best way I possibly can, and the rest of it just kind of comes off like a sock.”

We’re sitting in the unmarked studio of Pretty Dead Taxidermy, located in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, tucked in an alley just off Main Street.

 Lepeska leans forward and gestures to her assistant, who is arranging large, dead insects into picture frames. “If I were to take your skin and put it on Karen’s body, it would look weird.”

I nod, unable to agree more. To make her point, Lepeska hands me a piece of foam in the shape of a flying squirrel, one example of what she calls a “form,” a foundational structure for a taxidermied animal. The foam templates are further sculpted if the form doesn’t fit the skin. Lepeska’s earrings swing as she talks. They are not feathers, I realize, but moth wings.

After moving from Finland to Vancouver in 2016, Lepeska ran taxidermy classes out of a local curio storefront. The business expanded, becoming Pretty Dead Taxidermy, which now hosts an online shop of oddities in addition to offering taxidermy services for private collectors and film and TV commissions. They also run workshops through their Academy of Oddities, “to teach others the amazing beauty of nature,” Lepeska says. By simplifying the workshop procedures of butterfly pinning or taxidermy, the art and practice of preservation is accessible to beginners, even children. “If, out of ten students, two of them visit more natural history museums and do more studying, I’ve done my job.”

In the Academy’s “art classes with a dark vibe,” participants learn about arthropods and skulls while drawing real specimens, or practice the art of moth-pinning. Occasionally, the Academy collaborates with experts. “We had the head fish scientist from the aquarium talk about wet specimen preservation technique, why it is used in scientific study, why they preserve something. I’ll show you.” Lepeska disappears into the next room and returns with two jars, one of which she plops on her workstation. She passes me the other jar, made of clear glass, containing a diaphanous fish. The proteins and muscle mass have been chemically altered so the flesh is translucent. Red and purple dyes have infused the bone and cartilage. The fish, smaller than my hand, is a suspended phantom, its magenta skeleton an exquisite, vibrant exhibit of what lies beneath. How Lepeska landed on the name of her business is evident.

The fish seems to emit its own unnatural glow. Before this moment, the association between beauty and death never occurred to me. Though taxidermied animals don’t generally capture my breath in such a way, the fish is undeniably stunning. I eat fish, I’ve caught fish. Perhaps my food-chain relationship to this aquatic creature permits the sense of aesthetic pleasure I experience from the sight of its corpse. Or maybe the surreal pigment of its tiny bones, or the fact that it once had scales and not hair, put my own sense of mortality at a further remove than, say, the stuffed coyote standing in the corner—the mammal.

I tell Lepeska the fish is beautiful.

“That’s what I want to do,” she breathes. “If every single urban dweller would have a little piece of nature in their home, they would maybe appreciate it a little bit more.”

I look at the other jar. A dead rat floats in yellow liquid—a little piece of nature. House plants come to mind. And, outside this windowless studio in all directions, the magnum opus of Vancouver: mountains, beaches, parks, wildlife (and a lot of warm-blooded dogs—everywhere).

I have to ask about the skeleton on the shelf, however, because I suspect it has something to do with another service Lepeska offers: pet preservation. The skeleton, perfectly rendered, is crouched, tail curved, as if about to pounce.

“That’s a cat,” she says. “A domestic cat. After a few years, we expanded to different areas.” Lepeska stands. “I’m not really like a normal old school taxidermist who just does trophies.” She floats around the desk, around me. “I lost my dog really traumatically three years ago. He was only five months old and he was attacked and died of his injuries in front of our eyes.”

“By another dog?”

She presses her lips together. At the time, the only post-mortem service for pets that Lepeska could find was cremation, with the option of a paw or nose print. She approaches the cat on the shelf. “I wanted to keep his skeleton and get it rearticulated. I have friends in the industry, and I donated his skin to a friend of mine. My partner didn’t want to get him taxidermied, and that’s okay; it was triggering for him.” Reaching beyond the cat, Lepeska then turns around, holding a small gold and glass box. Inside, smaller than my fist, is a skull. “Now I have Milo here with me every day. I wanted to give that option to other people.” Since then, she has provided customized pet preservation services; clients can request almost anything, from full taxidermy to skeletal rearticulation.

I accept the small box from Lepeska. The skull can’t be much bigger than a golf ball. “This is a chihuahua?”

“Milo,” she corrects.

I’m not sure what to do with the box after tilting it around a few times.

Lepeska, though, has returned to the shelf. “There are different ways to do bone cleaning. A friend of mine has a dermestid beetle colony.” She explains the insects as “flesh-eating beetles that eat everything so it goes back to nature.”

I put Milo’s skull on the desk and reorient myself, conjuring an image from the 1999 film The Mummy, of scarab beetles that swarm humans and eat them to death. Not quite the M.O. of dermestid beetles, but almost—they don’t go for the live stuff, but will envelop a carcass and munch away all dead flesh and cartilage until the bones gleam.

She taps on a large glass jar of cloudy liquid. “The other option is maceration. There are five rabbit skulls in here. They are submerged in water and what you see here”—she points to floating white chunks—“is fat.” Lepeska looks around. “I don’t know if I have a greasy bone…”

The moment I laugh, Lepeska starts up too. “The shit I say here.”

Lepeska is concerned about quality, especially for the pet memorial projects. She pulls a large foam plate from the top shelf. “A lady brought us a cat that had been demolished by a coyote. He came to us in pieces, so we tanned and preserved the pelt and stitched it back together.” A full cat skin is laid out on the foam, fur up. Flipping it, the underside is leathery, each stitch a story of violent demise. The preserved tail and paws lay next to it. “Imagine coming home from work and you see your cat torn to pieces in your garden. That’s unbelievably traumatizing. So to be able to come and get something that looks nice—your trauma comes to the end of the cycle, so you can actually let go.” This is what makes pet preservation so challenging for the taxidermist—the client’s emotional attachment to the animal. Lepeska describes the process as exhausting. But afterwards, “I feel unbelievably privileged to be able to give them something back.”

Once a client contacts her, she advises them of the options for their deceased pet. The animal is kept at the studio in a freezer. To understand her client’s vision, Lepeska acquires reference photos and asks as many questions as possible to gain a sense of the animal’s personality, and to create a detailed concept for the final product. The pet is defrosted once she is ready to get to work. “It is pretty gnarly.” Lepeska is matter of fact. “You have to be able to disassociate yourself from what you’re doing.”

Preserving a pet, Lepeska explains, offers her clients a concrete way to remember a loved one. A keepsake, if you will. “Through taxidermy, you bring it back to life.” 

I ask what it feels like for her to have Milo’s skull near.

For a moment, the space goes quiet as she stares at me. “He’s still here. I’m so happy that he’s here.”

The assistant, Karen, looks up from her bug work. “He has the best afterlife.”  

Lepeska nods. “My friend made Milo’s skin into a full taxidermy dog. He’s lying in his beautiful miniature sofa in her house with the other taxidermy animals. It’s great.”

It’s impossible not to think about my own (living) dog, Javi, as I listen. She’s a mutt from Mexico, sweet and awkward with huge ears that stop people in the street. The thought of her stuffed and stagnant sends a shiver across my skin. I try to imagine her skeleton rearticulated, which is strange but seems more tolerable somehow. Still, I don’t really get it. Javi’s velvety ears would be far less cute, cold and detached from—or even still attached to—her head.

“His life was cut too short,” Lepeska says of Milo. “He never had a chance to fully experience life.”

When I return to the Pretty Dead Taxidermy studio a couple months later with some follow-up questions, Milo’s skull is arranged in the anatomically correct position—connected to the rest of his fully rearticulated skeleton. As an observer with no emotional connection to the chihuahua, I have to admit a certain level of fascination in seeing a complex biology stripped down to the singularity of its organic structural frame. Okay, okay—stripped to the bone. It might be a bit of a stretch to suggest that I “see” myself in this simplified version of Milo—forgive me—in the skeleton of a chihuahua (or of a fish, for that matter), but because I start to imagine what my own bones look like beneath flesh and fat and muscle and blood, it’s possible that I am relating, in some strange way, to the fact of a body, to both its vitality and its mortality.

Lepeska returns to the ever-giving shelf. “So, there is traditional taxidermy. And this is anthropomorphic taxidermy.” Mounted on a wooden platform are two white rats, standing on their back feet. One grips a bloodied butcher’s knife above its head, as guts spill from the chest of the other rat, their mouths frozen wide in terror. “This is called ‘Divorce.’” She wiggles the platform. “He’s like, ‘Waaah! You have to sign the papers!’ And she’s like, ‘Give me the fucking mansion!’” Lepeska credits her theatre background for her “weird ideas,” but assures me she’s not the only taxidermist who stretches the truth of her corpses. “Most have a little room at the back that they don’t show to everybody.”

There is no back room at Pretty Dead Taxidermy. Everything is allegedly out in the open, and considering how much Lepeska has shared already, I’d be hard-pressed not to believe her. 

Lepeska is aglow looking at her pugilistic rat creation. “I want to imagine them having their own little life. The normal reaction to rats is, ‘Ah! A rat in my house!’ And then you get a rat that looks like a fortune teller and you realize that’s what you wanted all your life. Pass me a beetle.” Karen passes her a huge rhinoceros beetle staged on a wing-backed chair, reading The Jungle Book, a bottle of shiraz in arm’s reach. Rhino beetles: they’re just like us.

Lepeska’s penchant toward the macabre is not home-grown. “In Finland, we don’t have open caskets. We don’t look at death. We don’t talk about death. We avoid every single thing about dying and death.” Travelling exposed her to other attitudes—“I realized that people carry their dead people with them”—until her perspective eventually shifted away from viewing death as a finality: “It doesn’t have to be.”

When Lepeska hands me a taxidermied rabbit head, I run my thumb over its forehead. The fur is soft. No signs allude to it ever not being just a head. “I weirdly… like this,” I admit.

“Right!” she explodes, laughing. “Everybody wants one!”

I do not share the enthusiasm about entering the orbit of a bodiless rabbit. But I do wonder if the “back room” I’d hoped Lepeska would reveal is perhaps a cerebral thing.

“The more I work with death and dying, the more I want to be here today,” she says.

“Where?”

“Right with you, right now.” Her hand taps the desk. “Know what I mean? Like, this moment is really meaningful. I don’t have any expect­ations for what happens after. I can make plans. But I’m not expecting them to happen.” She spins slightly in her chair, revealing her white leather sneakers. This time, I notice the fake bunny ears that replace a traditional shoe tongue.

And when Lepeska dies?

“My spirit—whatever you call that—is somewhere else. I don’t know where that is. I don’t have answers to that.”

She describes her body as a “vessel” which, when the time comes, she would like to donate for research. “Because I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs, I’m hoping that people can use my organs to give life to others.” Her hand flits through the air. “Do whatever you want. I’m not there anymore.”

I don’t imagine a back room where some taxidermist has staged Lepeska’s vessel into a grisly fight scene, but I do imagine her living on, in some partial way: as a heart, a liver, a lung. Even she doesn’t want to abandon this life.

Before we part ways, Lepeska invites me to participate in a death’s-head moth-pinning workshop later that evening. “Come back any time!” Her moth wings swirl below her ears as she strides away.

The moth-pinning workshop is sold out. The death’s-head hawkmoth is famous, thanks to its appearance in the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, and its name comes from the human skull-shaped markings on its thorax. 

Karen is facilitating. The person beside me isn’t new to this; he collects dead insects on his own and pins them. The woman across from me looks like an occultist social media influencer, but my assumption is wrong; she’s an embalmer.

The first step is to rehydrate the dead moth by filling its body with hot water using a syringe. I hold the moth in my palm, belly up.

“Stab it right in the chest.” Karen watches my hand hovering above the insect. “Just like in Pulp Fiction.”

This is helpful in my understanding of the velocity required, though less helpful in my motivation to stab it. I imagine the moth jolting to life, right into my face. Lepeska’s words echo in my head: Through taxidermy, you bring it back to life.

I jam the needle into the centre of the insect’s body. Many cultures believe the death’s-head moth is a symbol of rebirth. But nothing happens, and the moment is only further wilted as I place the moth in a Tupperware container with damp paper towel and wait for the brittle body to “relax.”

Once the moth is rehydrated, I stretch the wings out to their full capacity. But the body falls off. Karen reassures me that Gorilla Glue makes for a quick repair. As I affix the body to its rightful place between the pretty dead wings and below the thorax, the unmistakable icon of a human skull stares up at me and all I can see is myself.

‍

Image: Jackalope, photograph. Courtesy of Jo Lepeska, owner and founder of Pretty Dead Taxidermy.