Trent Alyse was often told to find a “real job”—plenty of which she had before stepping fully into herself as an artist creating jewelry and sculptures from what animals have left behind: their skulls, their teeth, their bodies.
“In college I was hanging around on some train tracks and found a raccoon jawbone and thought it looked cool. I tied it to a leather cord and wore it as a necklace for a long time. After that I started to notice dead things more,” Alyse told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.
At Florida State University, Alyse studied sculpture where she and her classmates were required to experiment with various materials, crafting armatures out of wire, using cardboard to build mockups, learning the basics of wood joints and power tools. This all came in handy as those skills she learned in sculpture translate to what she does now at Kitty Bomb Curios.
And, Alyse doesn’t just make any old jewelry. She hand crafts rattlesnake reliquaries, captures crystalline wasps in amber pendants, decorates deer jawbones, preserves cicada wings, collects and frames spider webs, adorns coyote skulls, and dyes and embellishes antique antelopes among things, like taking on custom requests and starting her own oddities magazine, Oddmag (stylized in all-caps).
What started out as an interest in the discarded has become a full blown passion and career for Alyse.
“At FSU, I studied sculpture, and for a while in my work I used broken pieces of mirror, sequins, pretty garbage that I would find in the gutters around all the party houses,” Alyse said. “Once I got into collecting bones, it struck me that as humans, we leave behind all this garbage to tell about who we are, but with animals, they really only leave behind their bones to tell their stories.”
And this, Alyse said, is what she really fell in love with—”taking something discarded and dirty, like broken glass or bones, and making it beautiful like it used to be…imagining the story behind them.”
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It wasn’t all easy to figure out, though. The bone processing (cleaning and removal of soft tissue and other organic remains) for Alyse was trial and error. Friends sometimes left her dead animals they found, and she learned over time that bacteria is actually the best bone-cleaning helper.
“Given the right conditions, it thrives and will eat flesh away quickly,” Alyse said, noting the graphic details. “Then you can just use a little soap and water to clean them, and peroxide to whiten them.”
She also found that while creating jewelry from bones or sculptures from taxidermy, the process was never going to be exactly the same.
“Even 20 mouse skulls are each going to have their own nuances—the teeth from one usually won’t fit into the jawbone from another,” Alyse said. “They have their own contours and needs. One deer might look fabulous dyed pink while the next one has a little twinkle in its eye that says it would look more playful in teal.”
While she started making jewelry with the basics (a couple pairs of pliers and a hand drill), her skill set and tool usage has expanded as she’s grown through her art and her practice. Little by little, she said, she was able to learn how to use a dremel tool and more sophisticated materials along the way.
And still, she is surprised that she’s able to do this work full time.
“As a kid, I always knew I wanted to be an artist, but everyone tells you to pick a ‘real job’. I’ve learned to trust myself and follow my instincts,” Alyse said. “Making art isn’t about following trends or appeasing an algorithm. It’s hard, but you can tell when something is unoriginal, and that comes through in more ways than just visually.”
Since she opened her Etsy shop in 2015, Alyse has learned a ton and met many interesting people.
“It’s been really cool to not only meet other people interested in the things that so many people find ‘weird,’” Alyse added. “So many times at shows I have heard things like ‘I hate taxidermy but this is really beautiful.’ It makes me feel like I am bridging that gap, helping to open people’s minds a little bit to things they may have been a little prejudiced about before.”
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