Donya Coward is an artist based in Nottingham, England, who creates fabulous textile taxidermy sculptures, giving new life to Victorian and antique French laces, embroideries, fabrics and haberdashery. Each one of them is made sewing different pieces of this stuff, and can take between four/eight weeks to complete.
The emphasis of my work is about preserving the materials as much as it is about the animal forms being imitated. My work takes inspiration from the imperfections and histories ingrained in the materials, hence why I choose not to was the fabrics as stains, repairs, and markings that have happened due to age, rusted pins or bleaching add character to the colourings and markings of the animal form.
Donya Coward