Auckland Museum blog

Road kill. You’ve driven past it, you may have been responsible for it, but you probably haven’t stopped to pick it up and give it false teeth and googly eyes. Andrew Lancaster, on the other hand, has.

Andrew Lancaster's vampire hare, on display in The Poisoners!

An example of his work, a hare with vampire teeth and bloodshot eyes, is on display in the Lab of Madness in The Poisoners! exhibition, which has just opened here at Auckland Museum.

Throughout the almost 11,000 kilometres of New Zealand’s state highways, animals from possums to magpies lie strewn and lifeless. To Andrew Lancaster they are offerings to the art of the taxidermist.

“I live in the country so I drive out the gate and every other morning there is something that’s been hit, possums and rabbits, sometimes ducks.,” Andrew tells me on the phone from the Bay of Plenty.

Andrew learnt taxidermy as a teenager growing up in Yorkshire where he used to help his brother, who was working to become a professional taxidermist.

“You make as small an incision as you can get away with and get everything out that hole. Turn it inside out basically. Preparing the skin for mounting is the hardest part and that’s what I did for my brother.”

One of Andrew's mix and match creations

A baby-dove.... or a dove-baby

But it wasn’t until Andrew moved to New Zealand about 15 years ago that he took up taxidermy as a hobby. “I just thought it was a shame seeing them [road kill] all lying on the road.”

A few years ago he started playing around with the animals, mixing up body parts. “I got a bit tired of doing the everyday natural looking ones and with road kill some parts are badly damaged but there might be a nice pair of wings or legs so I just cut them off.”

He uses an old fashioned method of taxidermy, using wire and woodwool (fine wood shavings), rather than the expanding foam favoured by most modern taxidermists.

Not all his animals are road kill, occasionally hunters will give him animals to mount. And only recently an obliging thrush flew into his workspace, hit the window and landed dead on his bench ready to work on.