“I have a very vivid imagination. The next thing
I’m thinking of doing is a tarantula with a human face."
Bart Jansen is a carpenter who makes a living installing solar panels in Holland. But he has always had bigger dreams – dreams of helping earthbound animals take flight. But only dead ones.
Jansen (pictured right, behind the flying cat) is one of the colourful characters film-maker Matt Rudge encountered while making his latest film, called Get Stuffed, about the resurgence in the art of taxidermy. “Though you have to be careful saying stuffed because taxidermists don’t like that,” Rudge warns. “Stuffed sounds aggressive and like you’ve got no respect for the animal. But there’s a lot of craft and time that goes into it.” For Jansen, the catcopter was a culmination of a lifetime of fascinations. “Ever since he was a young boy Bart wanted to be an inventor,” Rudge explains. “At the same time he has always been fascinated with death. He told me that he remembers his grandmother dying and while the rest of his family were huddled in a room crying, he wanted to touch her to see what death felt like.”
After a childhood of poking things with sticks in the Dutch countryside, Jansen went to art college and began using road kill as a medium.
“You grow up looking at pictures of animals in books but in real life the nearest most of us get to a rabbit or hedgehog are the ones that are flat at the side of the road,” Rudge says, making Jansen’s work sound quite rational. “He had two cats, named after the Wright Brothers. Sadly Orville went missing one day and they found that he had been run over.”
Jansen believed it was fate to develop his road-kill art with his recently deceased cat, as well as allowing the feline to fly with the birds. Jansen commented at Orville’s first flight: “Oh how he loved birds…” Orvillecopter hovers towards the extreme end of taxidermy, a craft that goes back centuries, and explores the relationship between life and death and the strange purgatory of being stuffed and plonked on a mantelpiece.
“We all struggle with death whether we’re religious or not,” Rudge says. “Some people find taxidermy confusing or distasteful or creepy because the animal still looks alive even though it’s dead but recently there has been a huge rise in the amount of people buying it, the amount it’s selling for and the amount of people doing it as a hobby. Interior design has jumped onboard and even gastropubs now have taxidermy inside their premises.”
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