Hey There
Hey There, I'm Sarah and i am the face behind The Beautiful Deceased.
I'm a thirty-something year old based in the county of Warwickshire with my family, and by family i mostly mean of the four legged and feathered variety!
All About Me
My journey began like many taxidermists, as a lover of animals and wildlife.
I never really fit in at school because i was never into music or the current trends, instead i'd much rather be getting mucky in the garden or climbing trees, fascinated by finding and collecting insects. I remember finding a worm once when i was very young, it was injured and i tried to make a bandage for it and then made a hospital tank for it to recover in 😂
When i reached my teens i struggled immensely in school with anxiety so much so that it really got me into a depressed state, i couldn't attend school any longer, it was just too much for me to cope with, and so i did some schooling from home.
As a way to find something to focus on that i enjoyed, i began boarding pets from my family home, caring for them while they're owners went on holiday in return for a small amount of pocket money, it was everything to me and i enjoyed it thoroughly.
I did this for a couple of years until i started to have a few pets of my own, majorly rabbits and guinea-pigs which expanded into the odd snake, giant snail and tarantula.
By my late teens my rooms were adorned with many reptiles in inverts of varying species and my garden shed full of many wondrous rodent species.
later on, i would take a few turns in life, some great, some not so but my animals came with me where ever i went and still do.
It was during a portion of my life just a few years ago that i discovered the delights of the Taxidermy world.
I was working with a large array of quite wonderful animals, everything from raccoons and possums, to genets and kinkajous.
But one thing i always found hard was when something died. At the time we had a fellow come and collect our fallen stock on a semi regular basis and off they'd go.
I didn't understand why at first, that this man was so keen to come and take all our dead animals, i later found out he distributed them to taxidermists.
So i became curious and joined a few communities of these folks who work with dead animals, i initially found a group of people who called themselves Vultures, which is just a totally cool thing anyway, these vultures are defined by their ability to go foraging for interesting natural wonders like skulls and bones, feathers, shells and anything else of the kind.
I already had a couple of skulls i had found on walks and i thought to myself, yes i think i could be a vulture 😎
It was during this time i stumbled across something called Wet preservation, you chemically fix the tissues of an animal and thus preserve them in their entirety forever! Now THAT is cool.
I taught myself to do this pretty early on, it was amazing, i could keep an animal in its natural state forever, but it did have to live in a jar of alcohol which wasn't so great since you can really only effectively do it with smaller animals.
So i collected skulls and preserved some smaller animals for a while, until i found myself between jobs one year and i looked into the art of taxidermy, i decided that i'd probably be ok with the gory side of it, i had always had a morbid fascination, in college i once skipped one of my practical animal husbandry lessons so that i could sit in one of the veterinary lessons and watch the tutor dissect a rabbit 😂
So i did it, i found a squirrel on the road that had been killed by a vehicle, it was so perfect, i decided this would be the day i do taxidermy, and i skinned that squirrel and i mounted it, my squirrel was perfect (it wasn't), it was so lifelike (it wasn't), i loved my squirrel (i did, but not for long) and i don't think i ever looked back after that!
No one is naturally good at taxidermy, it takes time and practice and most importantly you need to have that passion for it, as well as the natural world around you in order to find inspiration.
And if anyone ever tells you you're weird, embrace that shit because who wants to be normal anyways.
See my first ever attempt at taxidermy below, compared to a later one mounted very similarly, and give yourself a giggle 😁



