It was the eve of her first big New York show, and sculptor Christina Bothwell had the jitters. To calm her nerves, her husband suggested they go see a movie, any movie. The one they randomly picked starred Demi Moore as a sculptor who is delighted when a mysterious buyer (later revealed to be a killer, of course) snaps up a number of her artworks.

“I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if someone went to my show and bought a bunch of my pieces like that?’ ” Bothwell recalls. The next night at the gallery, someone did – none other than Demi Moore.

GLASS: What are you working on?
Christina Bothwell: My latest body of work involves using bits of taxidermy. In the photo, I’m working on a piece that will become a woman holding an owl. Beneath the owl’s abdomen will be a small human baby. The woman will have taxidermied geese feet instead of human feet because I’m playing around with the idea of creating the wife and child Icarus might have had. The idea initially came from seeing a 1903Kathe Kollwitz etching of a woman holding a dead child. I thought of making a piece of a woman holding a sleeping bird that held an infant inside its body.

I like incorporating found objects into my work, but using taxidermy and animal parts is a new thing for me. For a long time the idea of taxidermy made me feel kind of queasy, but this past winter I saw a taxidermied blue jay at a child’s birthday party and it was so beautiful I couldn’t stop thinking of it. What started out as consumer lust eventually led to thinking about how I could add that element to my work and maybe capture some of that same quality that moved me in the blue jay.