Brooklyn-based artist Kate Clark’s sculptures demand something from you. From a distance, they look like taxidermy specimens of various animals from all over the world — and they are. They’re made with real (and ethically sourced) animal hides wrapped around a clay form, but they have something else, too, something you can only see when you look at them head on.
The human faces are sculpted in clay using a live model as reference, and then the facial skin from the animal hide is cut, stitched, and pinned in place, creating an eerie blend of the human and the animal. Clark says she tries to preserve as much of the natural patterning as possible. Horns and ears are attached later, and rubber eyes complete the face — giving them unnerving, unblinking stares.
“I leave as much fur and patterning as I can, yet I want the human features to be clear and the skin to read as oily and porous, reflecting our skin,” Clark explains. “The process of sculpting the face takes months: I work until the transition of human/animal is smooth, striving for a balance of familiar yet unfamiliar, beautiful yet unnerving, lifelike and believable yet clearly constructed.”
A detail of one of Clark’s sculptures. The hide is held to the clay face structure by way of stitching and pinning.
The inspiration for these eerie pieces came to Clark while she was in graduate school. “I was making other sculptures and videos that explored the evolution of the human face and I decided to transform an animals features to be like ours — thinking the work would mainly talk about the human face’s power to communicate.” But as she worked, the focus shifted.
“I realized my sculptures went beyond a ‘scientific discussion of communication’ and instead brought on an emotional response and an intellectual discussion about our place in the natural world,” she says.
With their serene human faces and human-scale size, Clarke’s sculptures force us to explore the relationship between ourselves and nature, and our own animal origins. “Our current lifestyle does not necessitate physical interaction with wild animals,” she says.”Yet we revere the natural world and are seduced by characteristics we no longer see in ourselves, such as fierceness, instinctiveness, purity.”
They also serve to remind us that even with our technology, language, and opposable thumbs, we’re really not so different from the creatures with whom we share our planet, and that despite these similarities, animals and their habitats are routinely destroyed and exploited. By harming animals, the sculptures seem to suggest, we harm ourselves.
While it’s easy to disregard an animal as one of many, it’s harder to look away from a human face, which we recognize as an individual.
When displaying her pieces, Clark also typically puts them at human eye-level or higher, making the viewers confront the pieces directly, looking them right in the eye. This, Clark says, upsets the assumed hierarchy in which humans put themselves before animals.
While they may startle at first, the calm, dignified human faces of Clark’s sculptures become less jarring the more you look at them. What at first seems strange gradually becomes familiar, and the faces take on personalities and histories as we read them as more and more human, more and more like ourselves.
You can see more of Clark’s work on her website, as well as on Facebook and Instagram.
