“The Ascension/Tenth Life” by Marcia Field features a tabby cat Field picked up on the side of the road early in her taxidermy training, unaware that its face and skull weren’t salvageable. After a “spider web” of internal sewing to keep its body together, Field replaced its face with velvet and turned it toward the wall. That face is hidden as the cat, now on its “tenth life,” perches atop a late 19th century Catholic last rites kit, the type used to cleanse the dying of their sins. “Little did I know, as I worked on this elegant assemblage, I would be diagnosed with my own last rites, stage 4 terminal lung cancer,” Field wrote in her artist notes. “Life imitating art.”

In an effort to protect Marcia Field from additional illness, a sign at the entrance of the gallery asks visitors to wear a mask.

A miniature model of Marcia Field’s Exquisite Corpse taxidermy studio and gallery, made by her friend Angie Webster, sits on a table in the gallery in Madison. Webster made the tiny diorama when chemo treatments were keeping Field away from the place she loved. “I was hoping if she at least had that to hold onto, it would keep her mind going about ideas of what she wanted to do,” Webster said.

A coyote that taxidermy artist Marcia Field cleaned on her home kitchen table is now part of an award-winning art piece on display at Exquisite Corpse Taxidermy.

“Call to Faith” by Marcia Field features a squirrel climbing the front of a 1930s telephone box. A note invites viewers to open the door to reveal the box’s velvet-lined interior, adorned with a rosary, a statue of Jesus as a child, and a silver holy water vessel, all illuminated when the viewer lifts the phone receiver.

A collection of “looking glasses,” made by Marcia Field from preserved deer eyeballs, sit on a table in her gallery.

Adelaide Hurley works on bone jewelry at Marcia Field’s Exquisite Corpse Taxidermy studio and gallery on Atwood Avenue.

Marcia Field works on a 60-year-old wild boar, the last major taxidermy project she worked on before her death on Aug. 13. 

Marcia Field’s lab coat is draped over her desk chair where she last left it, beside the wild boar she was working on in the weeks before she passed away on Aug. 13. 

Business and local economy reporter

Marcia Field spent most of her adult life knowing she’d never grow old. So when she got a terminal diagnosis last year, at age 58, she wasn’t paralyzed by shock or grief.

Instead, she waited precisely one day before looking for a place to open the taxidermy gallery of her dreams.

To those who knew Field, it was an obvious choice. The former set decorator had begun filling her freezer with dead birds decades before in Chicago, while recovering from her first encounter with cancer. Years later, after moving to Madison, she’d called up local taxidermist Dan Gartner and asked to become his apprentice. There she learned to skin, preserve and mount hides, working for eight years pursuing her own projects, turning found carcasses into elaborate, surreal art.

On trips to other cities, she’d visit shops filled with artistic taxidermy and imagine what it’d be like to have a place like that in Madison. Her husband warned her that if she didn’t do it, someone else would, and it would drive her crazy.

But she held back, in part because of the devastating fatigue she’d endured since being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma at 29. Doctors told her they could cure her, but the treatment – heavy doses of chemotherapy and radiation – would likely rack her chest with lung and heart problems down the line.

“So we lived like we knew that,” Field said from a velvet armchair in her gallery on Atwood Avenue one afternoon in early August, just days before a rapid decline would sap her energy and leave her unable to speak.

“It was that trite silver lining to a darkness in life, that now that I'm here, I don't think I've had a wasted day.”

The next 30 years brought a bone marrow transplant, a heart stent, a pacemaker, a preventative double mastectomy, an unrelated joint disease, and, in June 2021, a terminal cancer diagnosis. On Aug. 13, two weeks after the Cap Times visited her studio, the lively artist died at home. A public celebration of life will take place at her gallery, Exquisite Corpse Taxidermy at 2716 Atwood Ave., at 4 p.m. on Oct. 2.

This is the story of Field’s decades-long dance with death, the surprising art born from that dance, and the people she inspired along the way.

A coyote that taxidermy artist Marcia Field cleaned on her home kitchen table is now part of an award-winning art piece on display at Exquisite Corpse Taxidermy.

Born April 26, 1963, Marcia Arnopol was raised on the north side of Chicago. She pronounced her name “Marsha” until marrying her college sweetheart, Aaron Field, in 1987. Tired of hearing jokes about Marshall Field’s department store, she started going by “Mar-SEE-ah.”

The switch caught on with everyone except her mother-in-law, who, surprised by her daughter-in-law’s quirky personality and unconventional taste, coined a phrase that would live on in the Field household for decades: “Marcia likes different.” Decades later, Field’s husband and pre-teen son would use that same catchphrase to explain her new interest in taxidermy.

Weakened by the Hodgkin's treatment and ensuing health problems, Field didn’t have the energy to hold a steady job, but she returned to school to study art history at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. As an intern at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., she was awed to be so close to the masterpieces. They offered her a job, but she turned it down to focus on starting a family.

Gallery visits by appointment only.

Email ade.fenton@gmail.com or call Adelaide Hurley at 1-844-TAXI-ART to schedule.

Celebration of Marcia Field's life

Sunday, Oct. 2, at 4 p.m.

Visit mmoca.org/event/gallery-night for more information.

The couple moved to Madison in 2001 when Aaron, a neuroradiologist, took a job at UW Health’s University Hospital. In 2004, they adopted a newborn named Max, who Field raised with devotion despite being physically unable to do some of the usual parental activities.

As her son grew older, Field found herself eager to return to her longstanding passion: art. She did printmaking and darkroom photography at UW-Madison, then decided she wanted a change.

“I thought, I really need to infuse my work with something nuts. Something absolutely crazy,” Field said. “The part of me that, as a woman, was not born yet.”

That something, she decided, was taxidermy. So she searched online for local shops and began an apprenticeship with Dan Gartner at Dan’s Taxidermy & Wildlife Art on Madison’s north side.

There, surrounded by hunters, trappers and fishermen, the lifelong city girl felt like Eva Gabor’s character on the 1960s sitcom “Green Acres,” who wore evening attire despite moving to a farm. Gartner figured she wouldn’t stick around.

But as Gartner slapped a dead animal on the stainless steel sink, carefully removed the hide, meticulously cleaned and repaired it and then fit it to a mannequin, Field felt like she was home.

“I watched him for a couple of weeks, and I absolutely loved it. There was no question,” Field said. She learned to wield the tools of the trade, from scalpels and forceps to band saws and drills. She became as painstaking as her mentor, airbrushing, sewing and gluing until the animal looked better dead than alive.

Field, who’d never gone hunting, said she was “prejudiced about hunters and gun folks” when she arrived. But she listened as Gartner told her about growing up in a family where hunting was a way to stretch the grocery money, and how he’d trapped and skinned chipmunks in Cherokee Marsh at 8 years old, promising his mom he’d make her a fur coat.

Soon, she too was thinking of taxidermy as “the ultimate in recycling. ... Like Dan, I find elegance and value and beauty in every single part,” Field said.

“Call to Faith” by Marcia Field features a squirrel climbing the front of a 1930s telephone box. A note invites viewers to open the door to reveal the box’s velvet-lined interior, adorned with a rosary, a statue of Jesus as a child, and a silver holy water vessel, all illuminated when the viewer lifts the phone receiver.

When Field wasn’t observing Gartner, she was hunkered in a back corner of the small workshop plugging away at her own projects, which melded taxidermy and everyday objects, often drawing sidelong glances from Gartner and his customers.

“They'd say, ‘Well … what's she doing today? What’s she doing with the ‘coon?’” Field recalled.

“And I’d be like, ‘You just wait until the whole interior of this antique phone is tufted in red velvet.’” Her unconventional approach, she said, was usually met with a grudging acceptance.

Women, meanwhile, admired Field’s most polished pieces. “You can have all the deer you want if they look like that,” they’d tell their husbands.

Before long, Field was bringing her work home — literally.

“I remember my first interaction with it: She was cutting up a coyote head on the kitchen table,” recalled Max, who was about 10 when Field began working at Gartner’s shop. “I had no forewarning — I just came home one day. And I never viewed the kitchen table the same.”

That coyote became one of her signature, award-winning pieces. Dubbed “Coyote Platter,” the coyote’s head is mounted not on a traditional wooden plaque but on a silver platter that her mother-in-law received as a wedding gift in the 1950s. Framing the coyote, Field attached wire that she strung with beads and wrapped with glossy strands of her son’s hair.

“The Ascension/Tenth Life” by Marcia Field features a tabby cat Field picked up on the side of the road early in her taxidermy training, unaware that its face and skull weren’t salvageable. After a “spider web” of internal sewing to keep its body together, Field replaced its face with velvet and turned it toward the wall. That face is hidden as the cat, now on its “tenth life,” perches atop a late 19th century Catholic last rites kit, the type used to cleanse the dying of their sins. “Little did I know, as I worked on this elegant assemblage, I would be diagnosed with my own last rites, stage 4 terminal lung cancer,” Field wrote in her artist notes. “Life imitating art.”

But it wasn’t just Field’s wildest work that turned heads. In 2017, Gartner encouraged her to go to Springfield, Illinois, for the World Taxidermy Championships. Among the pieces she took with her was the first deer she’d taxidermied, a traditional shoulder mount like the ones that adorn Up North cabins and basements. She planned to enter the deer in the novice competition, but organizers mistakenly placed it in the professional category.

“Now she's competing against guys like me that make a living doing it,” Gartner said, explaining that deer heads are one of the most common taxidermy mounts, so there’s plenty of competition and lots of room for finding fault.

“First and only deer she ever did, and she walked out of the world competition with a second place ribbon.”

Though Field admired Gartner’s craftsmanship, she had no interest in preparing traditional mounts from hunted or trapped game. And, like her mentor, she always said no to grieving pet owners looking to preserve their lost friends. “Pets don't turn out right. They just never look alive,” Field said.

Instead, she developed an eye for roadkill, or “road gems,” as she liked to call it. “In France, they call it ‘bijoux de la rue,’” reads an elegant sign hanging in a silver frame on the gallery wall, offering no hint that Field made up the term herself. 

She began carrying a bucket of rubber gloves, face masks, trash bags, a shovel and a hacksaw in the back of her Jeep Wrangler so she’d always be prepared to scrape the next raccoon or squirrel off of the side of the road. Friends brought her the dead creatures they found, including dozens of chipmunks, which she’d pile in the walk-in freezer at Gartner’s shop.

Over her nearly decade-long taxidermy career, Field created about a dozen major pieces, each of which she’d work on for months or years. All feature a taxidermied animal in an artistic context, typically with a combination of humorous and serious elements. She cites as influences Surrealist artists like Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, as well as contemporary montage artist Barry Kite. Though much of her work involves religious themes, she said she didn’t notice that pattern until she saw her pieces mounted side by side in the gallery.

In one piece, called “Call to Faith,” a squirrel climbs along the front of a 1930s telephone box. A note invites viewers to open the door to reveal the box’s velvet-lined interior, adorned with a rosary, a statue of Jesus as a child, and a silver holy water vessel, all illuminated when the viewer lifts the phone receiver.

Another piece, “The Ascension/Tenth Life,” features a tabby cat Field picked up on the side of the road early in her taxidermy training, unaware that its face and skull weren’t salvageable. After a “spider web” of internal sewing to keep its body together, Field replaced its face with velvet and turned it toward the wall. That face is hidden as the cat, now on its “tenth life,” perches atop a late 19th century Catholic last rites kit, the type used to cleanse the dying of their sins.

“Little did I know, as I worked on this elegant assemblage, I would be diagnosed with my own last rites, stage 4 terminal lung cancer,” Field wrote in her artist notes. “Life imitating art.”

Some see that iconography and think she’s mocking religion, but Field said that wasn’t her intention. Instead, she said, she aims to explore the elegance and beauty of religion while also making viewers reflect on “what pains it’s caused in our world.”

Field has Jewish and Italian heritage, and her husband’s grandmother would likely have been killed in the Holocaust if she hadn’t left Warsaw just before Hitler invaded Poland. That fact weighed on Field, leading her to travel to the Nazi death camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2016 and to tattoo the date of her visit on her forearm.

Reflecting on that experience, she created “Goebbels’ Wet Dream/The Exterminator,” a cabinet of curiosities that explores the sorts of evils that humans are capable of. In it, an elegant muskrat sits beside a can of Zyklon B — a pesticide and rat poison used in the Nazis’ gas chambers — and an array of Nazi propaganda used to perpetuate the idea that Jews were vermin.

“It's heavily informed by our history,” Field said of her body of work.

Other pieces combine the religious with the deeply personal. In “Sacred Heart,” a cheerful raccoon perches atop a roof vent. Wires extend from a velvet-lined hollow in its chest to a flat object clasped in its paw: a replica of Field’s first pacemaker.

In an effort to protect Marcia Field from additional illness, a sign at the entrance of the gallery asks visitors to wear a mask.

Even when Field was well, she was plagued by unpredictable bouts of exhaustion. “So many times I’ve seen her be just incredibly excited about something she had planned to do, get up, get dressed and then say, ‘I can’t do it,’ and go back to bed,” her husband said.

She often worried others would think she was faking, because she looked healthy.  “She never forgave herself for that,” he said. “She held herself to such a high standard.”

Despite those challenges, Field visited Gartner’s shop a few days each week for years. There, she’d sit at her makeshift station in a back corner, chipping away at projects.

“Doing this kind of stuff made her happy,” Gartner said. “A whole ‘nother world opened up to her, and she liked it so much that she would do the projects … that nobody else would ever want to touch with a 10-foot pole because it was difficult.

“You can never pick out anything easy, can ya?” Gartner would ask her, marveling at her ability to stick with a project to the end.

But by June 2021, Field was fainting on bike rides in the Arboretum, waking up as the paramedics carted her away. She struggled for breath on her usual walks of a couple miles. When the symptoms became too much to ignore, she saw her doctor and learned she had stage 4 lung cancer. Treatment might buy her more time, they explained, but it wouldn’t save her.

“They said, ‘We have patients who've lived months, and we have patients who’ve lived years,’” Field said.

The next day, she began hunting for a spot for the gallery she’d long envisioned. “I had all this beautiful work in boxes in my house. And I said, ‘Aaron, I'm not going to have a retirement to spend on. This is how I want to spend it,’” Field recalled.

Inspired by the time she spent as an international volunteer renovating a castle in Czechoslovakia, she imagined a “Bohemian brothel” filled with furniture she’d collected from relatives. It would have a sitting room and parlor, along with a bar where Field could mix cocktails for guests and even stir them with raccoon penis bones.

Together, they searched for the right spot. Field, who once styled windows for Bloomingdale’s, hoped for a storefront where passersby could watch her work. What they found instead was a rear unit at 2716 Atwood Ave., a collection of commercial spaces and artist studios.

A collection of “looking glasses,” made by Marcia Field from preserved deer eyeballs, sit on a table in her gallery.

They picked up the keys in November and set to work transforming it into the gallery and studio of Field’s dreams. Family and friends pitched in to paint, build the bar and hang barn wood.

Throughout those months of renovations, Field would often pause on the leather couch and survey her surroundings, which were filled with her “most beautiful, prized shit.” She pictured visitors stopping in to see her and her work, and perhaps to take some of it home.

“I feel like Pharaoh making my tomb. I feel like I’m making my pyramid,” Field thought.

Field’s illness delayed the opening, but by March, Exquisite Corpse Taxidermy was ready. Tucked at the end of the hall, it reminded her of a speakeasy.

At a desk in one corner, surrounded by shelves of pelts and relics, she’d work on her latest project and listen to a mix of opera, jazz standards and the electronic duo Thievery Corporation. Once, she tried gutting a creature in the gallery bathroom but the smell was overpowering. Those dirtier processes, she decided, would need to happen only at Gartner’s shop. 

When she had the energy for guests, she’d place a sandwich board on the sidewalk announcing the gallery was open. But even the dreamworthy space greeted visitors with a sharp dose of reality. “The artist has lung cancer. Kindly wear a mask,” read a sign in the entryway.

In May, at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s Gallery Night, Field was feeling well enough to host 200 to 300 people.

“I always worked in that little corner with hunters around me. And here (it was like) my peeps had found me,” Field recalled in early August, just a few days before her illness rendered her nearly unresponsive.

“The looks on the people when they walked in was kind of a metaphysical send-off to me. All the other burlesque dancers and the carnies and the gamers wanting (preserved deer) eyeballs and bone jewelry and skulls, they found me.”

“I hate the fact that it took a terminal diagnosis to make it happen,” Field’s husband said of the gallery. “But you know how it is with people: Sometimes it takes something like that for them to finally make their dream come true.”

Marcia Field works on a 60-year-old wild boar, the last major taxidermy project she worked on before her death on Aug. 13. 

Adelaide Hurley, 28, still remembers the second time she had dinner with Field. Their husbands played in a band together, and they met up at upscale French bistro Sardine.

Field showed up with a tacklebox full of bones. “That’s just who she is,” Hurley said with a laugh. “We’re in the middle of this beautiful, expensive restaurant, and she’s showing me her box of bones and turtle claws. And I must have reacted in the right way.”

Their friendship continued that way for about two years. When Field began planning for the gallery, she asked Hurley, who was unemployed after leaving a job in social services, for help setting up the space. Soon Field had hired her as an assistant, teaching her to make jewelry from tiny bones and later putting her in charge of that part of the operation.

Field taught Hurley to use a drill to make minute holes in beaver knuckles and possum bones, and to string bits of fur and bone alongside things like metal washers, tiny glass tubes and rubber washers.

“She would literally go bead shopping at the hardware store,” Hurley said. “She meshes the pretty and the weird and the gross and the gritty together in such a fascinating and gorgeous way.”

Within months, Hurley was cutting open dead animals. “I ended up skinning chipmunks and cleaning rotten flesh off of bones,” Hurley said. “It definitely went a lot farther than moving a few boxes, but I’m so grateful that it did.”

Field loved that a growing wave of women were getting into taxidermy, and she tried to convince Hurley to join the ranks. Hurley recalled one day, when the two were cleaning decomposing flesh off coyote tails in the bathroom sink.

“She looks at me with this dead, rotting thing in her hand and says, ‘Adelaide, once you really love me and accept me for who I am, you'll carry a shovel, some gloves and a bag in your car,’” Hurley laughed.

But both knew that wasn’t going to happen. “It’s always been more her that I was fascinated with,” Hurley said. She loved the way her friend saw the world, the way that it seemed she never stopped thinking of creative ideas. “Every minute I had with her was a gift.”

Hurley still wears the many pairs of platform combat boots that her friend passed along. Those boots, she thinks, embody just who Field was: someone who was going to do exactly what she wanted, whether others approved or not. Someone who was, as Hurley puts it, “uncaged.”

“She’d tell me, ‘Live like you’re dying now. Why wait?’” Hurley said. Once Field texted her to say that a local bar was hosting an underwear party. “Go live it up, girlfriend! Have a good time,” Field said.

Today, even after her friend’s death, Hurley still hears that voice in her head, and she does her best to listen.

Adelaide Hurley works on bone jewelry at Marcia Field’s Exquisite Corpse Taxidermy studio and gallery on Atwood Avenue.

Ryan Nicholls, 31, met Field a couple of weeks before she died. He was with a friend at A Room of One’s Own bookstore in July when the friend looked across the street and spotted a sign for the gallery. Nicholls, who’d long been interested in taxidermy and macabre art, called the number on the sign to ask about visiting the gallery or even becoming an apprentice.

Because of her illness, she explained, she couldn’t take on a trainee, but she told him she’d love to meet to discuss his artistic interests. Nicholls told her about the cabinet of curiosities he’d been adding to for years, and how he’d like to build more. Happy that this young person shared her passion, she excitedly emailed him more information.

When Nicholls finally visited the gallery at the end of July, Field had begun using oxygen, and she sometimes forgot to bring it with her as she enthusiastically showed him around. He left with two antique drawers to turn into cabinets of curiosities.

For Nicholls, who previously worked for a hospice program, being around death was nothing new. What shocked him was the way this near-stranger treated him like a dear friend.

“It was very humbling because she chose to spend some of the little time that she had left to sit down and talk to me,” Nicholls said. “It made a really big impact on me, and I had to go and tell all of my friends and my family, ‘Thank you so much for choosing to spend some of your time with me,’ because we all don't know how much time we have left.”

Immediately after their meeting, Nicholls took up his art again, tossing his old anxieties that his work wouldn’t be good enough. “She really slapped some sense into me. She let me know, ‘Look at me. Look at my situation. I still went ahead and I did the thing that I wanted to do. I created what I wanted to create,’” Nicholls said.

That meeting, he said, convinced him to pursue his passions. “Other people might not understand it. They might think it's strange, or off-putting. But there will always be people out there who also enjoy those things, as well, and it's about meeting those people, building that community.”

Two weeks later, when Field was on her deathbed, Nicholls texted her husband a photo of the cabinet of curiosities he’d made from one of the drawers. “I can guarantee that Marcia would absolutely LOVE it!!,” Aaron Field wrote back, promising he’d share it with his wife if she woke up.

In June, Field was hospitalized with an infection. “Why am I still alive? I’m done,” she told her husband. She considered starving herself to hasten her death. When she recovered, her lungs had hardened so much that she needed an oxygen tank to ease her breathing, and she was too weak to resume cancer treatment. She opted instead for in-home hospice care.

For a year, she’d told her family that she’d like to “die with dignity” through doctor-assisted suicide, but she knew Wisconsin – and most other states – prohibit the practice.

In her final months, Field spoke frankly about the dozens of projects that she likely wouldn’t be able to complete. There was the massive wild boar, which sat for years in Gartner’s freezer, that she’d hurried to finish. Two weeks before she died, she sat at her desk in the gallery combing its shockingly glossy hair yet again and describing the jewels she planned to add to the fur collar she’d affixed at the base of its neck.

On the wall behind her hung a coyote-shaped mannequin for the project she hoped to take on next, if time allowed. An homage to Auschwitz, the project would feature an open-mouthed, taxidermy coyote descending steps made of shadow boxes, each filled with the sorts of items stolen from Jews as they arrived at the death camps: baby shoes, hair, eyeglasses, kitchen utensils, menorahs. Behind them, a poster would show a Nazi commandant deciding who would die immediately in the gas chambers, and who would be spared death for now.

A few feet away sat a box of glass Scotch bottles, which she’d recently learned to cut and reseal. These, she once hoped, would hold her collection of preserved animal fetuses. “That's one I don't know if I'll get to, but the fetuses are waiting in jars,” Field said.

She’d already begun looking for other artists who might put her various animals, supplies and ideas to use.

Marcia Field’s lab coat is draped over her desk chair where she last left it, beside the wild boar she was working on in the weeks before she passed away on Aug. 13. 

“There's an art-historical fascination with the work that is ‘on the easel’ when the artist dies,” Field said. “Where were the design plans? Where were the blueprints? And what were the ones that were packed away in drawers that only he or she ever saw? Those are probably the most interesting projects that an artist might ever make.

“I will have notebooks of my next ideas. They're all very organized in plastic sheeting … and so those will all have to be posthumously enjoyed,” Field said, estimating that she had around 20 such plans. In Gartner’s freezer, she said, she had two bins full of hides awaiting an artist. The jewelry, at least, would continue, for as long as Hurley chose to keep it up.

Glancing around, she thought about the gallery itself, perhaps her largest and proudest work, one she knew might not outlive her by much. With another six months or a year of word-of-mouth, she guessed, it might have been the meeting place she dreamed of, where artists — especially women — would regularly talk art and get to know each other.

“I’ve asked Aaron to keep it going, whatever is convenient for him,” Field said with surprising cheer. “He knows where my heart is, and he’ll do what he can, what feels right for the space — and for his life.”

Aaron Field is still figuring out what to do with the gallery, but plans to leave it up, at least for now. “I don’t think I have the heart to just tear it all down. That would just feel too tragic to me,” he said.

He and Hurley plan to include the gallery in the next Gallery Night, scheduled for Nov. 4.

Meanwhile, as Field neared the end, her friend Angie Webster, Gartner’s partner, looked for ways to help her hang onto the beloved place. An expert diorama artist who specializes in elaborate, shoebox-sized scenes featuring taxidermy pet store mice, Webster worked on an even smaller scale to create a parting gift for her friend.

Inside a metal Altoids box, she pasted tiny photos of Field’s signature works. Below them sit a miniature array of taxidermy books and a miniscule version of one of the gallery’s signs. It is the space itself, pocket-sized.

Webster’s voice cracked as she told the Cap Times that she’d made the diorama when chemo treatments were keeping Field away from the place she loved. “I was hoping if she at least had that to hold onto, it would keep her mind going about ideas of what she wanted to do,” Webster said. As she hurried to finish the small box for her dying friend, she thought about the pressure Field must feel to finish her own massive projects.

A miniature model of Marcia Field’s Exquisite Corpse taxidermy studio and gallery, made by her friend Angie Webster, sits on a table in the gallery in Madison. Webster made the tiny diorama when chemo treatments were keeping Field away from the place she loved. “I was hoping if she at least had that to hold onto, it would keep her mind going about ideas of what she wanted to do,” Webster said.

In her final days, Field enthusiastically showed off the gift. “I said, ‘Angie, you can’t take it with you,’” Field laughed. “She said, ‘That’s why I made it small. We’ll find somewhere.’”

The way her mentor Gartner sees it, a good taxidermist can give an animal eternal life. “With Marcia’s stuff, she's making herself live forever,” Gartner said. “Her personality is going into all these mounts, and they’re there hanging on the wall. Her character is right there, and that keeps her around longer.

“It sends messages out. You look at the mounts and they’re speaking to you.”

Even as she contemplated her own death, the woman who once gave a cat a “tenth life” tried to see her own death as a new beginning. She told her husband she hoped he wouldn’t give a eulogy about how she was a brave warrior who’d fought a long battle. It was too cliché, she told him, and she didn’t see herself that way.

He asked if she had a better metaphor.

“How about something more vaudevillian?” she offered. “Think of me as Houdini and celebrate my final escape.”

In the end, Field made it out with as much life as anyone, evading the indignities of a hospital death and much of the fear that overcomes many people when they contemplate their own mortality.

As she said, “When you're lucky enough to live each day knowing that they're limited, you can live very beautiful days. And then they end. You can fall apart or not.”

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Exquisite Corpse Taxidermy, located at 2716 Atwood Ave., houses the surreal work of the late artist Marcia Field, who died earlier this month. 

Business and local economy reporter

Exquisite Corpse Taxidermy, located at 2716 Atwood Ave., houses the surreal work of the late artist Marcia Field, who died earlier this month. 

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