Jessica Joslin is an elegant woman with piercing grey-green eyes and pale skin, set off with a blood-red shock of hair piled up high on her head. Dressed in black, the 37-year-old mixed media artist welcomes Bizarre into her home to share the secrets of the “Victorian clockwork” aesthetic that drives her eerie and magical artwork.

Jessica creates ‘creatures’ from the bones of animals and discarded brass scrap metal. The figures command your attention and emit a sense of wonder mixed with the macabre – they evoke feelings most of us left behind a long time ago when we put down childish things and took up the reins of adulthood. A monkey riding a tricycle wearing a fez and a deer decorated with a Cleopatra-style headdress watch us with dead black eyes, as she tells us about how she assembled her menagerie.

“I don’t go looking for roadkill any more,” she says in a low, husky voice. “I buy the bones from osteological suppliers – and I know a lot of bone dealers. If you find a bone and you don’t know where it came from, you can get into trouble for using it. Finding a skull on the street doesn’t mean you can keep it.”
Jessica shows Bizarre cabinets and drawers stuffed with the skulls and bones of birds and small mammals, all as bright and white as children’s teeth. When she lived in the country, she’d go on roadkill scavenging trips and find the carcasses of birds and animals – but then had to work out how to clean her treasures before she could use them.

“I’d find dead bodies in the woods and wrap them in chicken wire to protect them from being carried away by wild animals,” she says. “I’d come back a couple of months later to find the elements had completely cleaned the bones.”
The main structure of Jessica’s sculptures are made from brass. Stuff found in junk shops and flea markets – light fittings, chandelier parts, decorative sconces, radiators and gas lamps – are also all fair game. She’s used to fitting strange things together as she also works as a commercial model maker, building prototypes of toys.

“Any one peculiar item with a nice patina can be the starting point of a new pet. I look for items that have an nice tone to them,” she explains.  “I spent many years building architectural models and toy prototypes where I needed an incredible level of precision. And I apply that to my art.”

These creations aren’t just glued together. Jessica takes the raw materials and fuses the pieces mechanically – drilling new threads to assemble the skeletons perfectly, as they may be made from different gauges of pipes or solid lumps of brass with no identifiable origin. And the bones themselves have their own peculiar characteristics to consider.

“It all needs to be over-engineered to compensate for the extreme differences in bones between species,” she says. “For example, the outside casing of bird bones are extremely thin. The skeleton is composed of delicate lattice work that keeps it light for flight, whereas a cow bone is like rock – there’s very little hollow area in it. It’s dense because it supports all this flesh. So I have to be aware of their particular qualities.”

The animals’ eyebrows and hair come from little trimmings taken from objects such as embroidered gloves, or the fringes on vestment trims. These quirky touches give her work a curious sense of fun that somehow defies the creepiness. Many of her beasts appear to be alive, animated even. One of her favourite reference points is the Victorian circus – many of her animals balance on balls or ride bikes.

 “I don’t think of what I’m doing as dark, necessarily,” she says. “Death is inherent in the work because of the bones, of course. But I see the work as part of the love for the living creature – and if they’re going to have a life after death, I want it to be fun.”  

Whimsical but perverse, these animals seem to have emerged from a forgotten era. Jessica admits influences such as the madcap taxidermy of British artist Walter Potter and the anatomically perfect etchings of John James Audubon, as well as the nightmarish paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.

As a child her father would take her to the Harvard Museum Of Natural History in Boston, where she was intrigued by the ability to get close to the stuffed birds and animals and really study them. These Victorian collections came with the era’s presentations and grandiosity: wooden cabinets with brass plaques are another obvious link to Jessica’s work.

Though fascinated by the Victorian obsession of collecting anatomical specimens, it wasn’t until she was studying photography at college that Jessica took her first steps towards the sculptures she makes today.

A huge mirrored wall at the base of the Art Institute Of Chicago was where Jessica got hold of her first raw materials. Birds would crash into the wall and fall down to the pond below. “It was a graveyard with all these incredibly brilliantly coloured little jewels,” Jessica says. “It made me so sad to see guys fishing the dead birds out with nets and dumping them in the garbage. So I started taking them home and preserving them.”

 It was around this time that Jessica met her husband Jared. He saw her watching the birds circulating in the flow of the fountain. They started chatting, and within minutes they discovered they both had a freezer full of dead birds! As Jessica says, “I gave him my phone number and offered to give him taxidermy lessons – and that was that!”

Jared, himself a wonderful artist whose style is rooted in the 1930s, has always been a great supporter of Jessica’s work. “My earlier pieces had quite rigid poses,” she says. “He was one of the first people to say, ‘You need to figure out a way to make them more lively’. So I got them to bend, twist and pose more.”

Jessica’s been showing and selling her work in Chicago since she left college, but finds local taste a little conservative. Her art sells thorough the Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona. She finds her exhibition openings are a good way to judge how her work is received. She smiles, “People are either horrified or delighted. There isn’t a whole lot in between!”

As her work gets larger (her biggest piece, Francesca the Ostrich, stands at eye level) she hopes to reduce the weight of them by using wood instead of metal where she can. She also has an eye to creating the plinths and cabinets that enhance her Victoriana aesthetic. Ever one to see a identify a new challenge and master it, she’s training at the deep end by building sets on the new Johnny Depp remake of Public Enemy in Chicago.

Jessica sees beauty in the dead, but happily doesn’t covet bones of the living. “I think of the animals I use as muses,” she explains. “I never think, ‘I wish I could get that bone out of that guy’ but more like, ‘come here and sit for me’. I’ll pose and study my friends’ pets for ideas.” She thinks working with human bones would be cheesy – the art would be overwhelmed by the controversy of her using such grisly materials – but her own bones could be an exception. “I’d like my own remains to become part of a metal structure. I’d leave instructions on how to assemble it with my bones after my death.”

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