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A student photographer explores
the last cycle in nature’s circle of life.
TEXAS WOMEN’S UNIVERSITY,
Master’s in Photography
with a Minor in Intermedia
by Jason Working
It was Angilee Wilkerson’s deep love for the landscape
of Texas—in particular the Red River and Trinity River
watersheds and the nearby Chisholm Trail—that sparked
the idea for The Remains series. The series is an eerie collection
of stylized still lifes of discovered animal remains that
Wilkerson hopes will convey some of the ambiguity and beauty
she sees while walking through her favorite piece of Texas
wilderness.
“It’s an area full of floodplains, thickets and
prairie, and more and more, it’s being subsumed by real
estate developers,” Wilkerson explains. “The landscape
is such a beautiful canvas. Each time I walk in this area,
it changes. But it’s subtle. You have to look closely.”
When Wilkerson was tasked with compiling an original project
for her master’s in Photography at Texas Women’s
University, she knew that the dead animals she’d been
encountering on her walks might serve as a conduit. She wanted
to get people to think about our threatened environment and
the uncertainties of life and death. Wilkerson thought the
bones she came across, specifically coyote, beaver, rat, bird,
armadillo, opossum, deer and the occasional bobcat bones,
would make perfect subjects.
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| © Angilee Wilkerson |
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| Vintage look: The images were mounted on brass plates
treated with polymer to make the series look antiquated. |
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“I’d walk and in the process pick up these bones,”
she relates. “This might sound macabre, but the bones
have a kind of sweet, earthy smell that is really kind of
pleasant—when you get them home.”
The found relics weren’t always picture-ready. “A
lot of times, I ended up tooling a bone out of the ground
and there were insects and skin still attached,” she
says. But after some cleaning and preparing, Wilkerson would
position each piece where she wanted it in the frame and,
using her Nikon D100, captured digital images of the remains.
“I’d just sort of play around and put them where
I liked them,” she says. “When they looked right,
I’d get [the shot].”
She then employed an image-lift process and used brass plates
treated with polymer, raw beeswax and earth resin to create
a series of 7” x 9” plates that evoke an antiquated
tintype but are moodier and more textured in color. And unlike
the chemical-heavy tintype process, Wilkerson’s process
is environmentally safe, again reflecting her awareness of
man’s impact on nature. “I developed this technique
out of a desire to make work reminiscent of 19th-century processes,
but without the heavy-metal toxicity,” she says.
The Remains series has an exquisiteness that creeps up on
you, which is what Wilkerson says she was aiming for. “I’m
intrigued by that sense of unknowing, by something that’s
not definable,” she says. “What I’m doing
is kind of turning these remains into fetish objects—something
beautiful.”
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