Michelle Molinari is a painter and installational artist. Her work thematically addresses both the concepts of death and animal beauty through the physical nature of the taxidermic medium and depicted subject matter of her painted works. Molinari’s work seeks to investigate the cultures of longing that impel the urge to preserve something from nature’s inevitable course.
Drawing upon the histories of taxidermic representation and the European still life tradition, Molinari often creates her own taxidermy which generates the inspiration for her still life arrangements. Working from observation, her paintings highlight the artist’s own gestural motivations for preserving and memorializing the death of these specimens.
‘The process and understanding of taxidermy itself is vital to the developmental process of my work, not only does the act of creating the taxidermy enable me to acquire an internal and empathetic understanding of the animal, it is also just as revealing of the human sentiment to hold something away from death as well as reveal it.’