Known for her elegantly composed, physically substantial, and metaphorically elusive installations, Petah Coyne creates sculptures that are tenuous despite their stability. They are at once vulnerable and forceful, beautiful and bizarre, life-affirming and morbid. By inviting dichotomies into her work, Coyne not only acknowledges but embraces the fact that contradictions permeate all aspects of modern existence. Furthermore, due to her attraction to the decadent and morose, Coyne allows Romantic and Victorian undercurrents to infiltrate her art and influence her material choices. Particularly, Coyne features taxidermy, a product associated with antiquated mentalities of the nineteenth-century, in many of her sculptures. In Untitled # 1336 (Scalapino Nu Shu) (2009-10; Pl. 3), for example, twenty-seven stuffed birds--ten roosting peacocks and seventeen hanging pheasants--fill the blackened branches of a Japanese apple tree, while Untitled #1242 (Black Snowflake) (2007-12; Fig. 1) features a single peacock.

Petah Coyne was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1953. Her mother had a Master's Degree in Ikebana (the art of Japanese flower arranging) and her father was in the military, which led the family to move approximately fifteen times over the course of twelve years before settling in Dayton, Ohio. This itinerant lifestyle exposed Coyne to a variety of cultures, landscapes, and attitudes toward nature. (1) While living in tropical environments (the family spent several years in Hawaii), Coyne engaged with nature on a very personal level. Her family tended to a Japanese garden that was always filled with exotic birdlife, and she once helped save a beached whale. (2) Coupled with fond memories of visits to natural history museums, these formative experiences inspired Coyne's lifelong interest in nature, fostered a deep regard for all of its inhabitants, and were foundational for her artistic endeavors.

Coyne enrolled at Kent State University in 1972, later transferring to the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where she earned her degree in 1977. After graduation, she moved to New York City. Being sensitive to her environment, Coyne sought inspiration in her immediate surroundings. No longer surrounded by crystal-clear oceans, uninterrupted blue skies, and exotic wildlife, she trolled the streets around her Soho neighborhood and elsewhere in the city. Most interesting to her were Chinatown, where she was taken by the many vendors selling produce and seafood, and Brooklyn, where she found in trash bins discarded taxidermied specimens (presumably discarded by museums and private collectors). Appalled that beautiful animal bodies were either being sold to passersby or buried in the trash, Coyne sought to remedy the situation. She purchased the dead fish and exhumed the stuffed animals from their dumpster graves and placed them in her artwork, giving them a proper burial and a new life. Coyne had found the material--both intellectual and physical--from which to create.

During an interview with the author, Coyne reminisced about how she was always taught that "you're supposed to take what is thrown away and make something good from it, to make something beautiful." (3) Encountering rejected animal bodies deeply upset her. Not only did she feel as though...