Alexis Wright stands among her artistic creations in Oddly Beautiful Creations in the back of Salon & Spa Absolute in the Fiddler’s Run Shopping Center.
The bottles contain lizards, snakes, and animal fetuses suspended in alcohol.
You never know who might be hanging around at Wright’s Oddly Beautiful Creations, including the deer mounts that she didn’t stuff, but she did paint and decorate.
In the back of a salon in Fiddler’s Run Shopping Center, snakes and lizards coil within jars of preservative alcohol, dotting the shelves alongside shadowboxes with decorated tarantula sheddings and a chicken foot with pink-painted nails and a rose wrapped along its scaly shin.
These creative works slithered from the mind of Alexis Wright, a Burke County resident, the co-owner of Salon and Spa Absolute, and the sole owner of Oddly Beautiful Creations.
“I’ve always been very artsy,” Wright said, the sunlight from the salon’s front windows shimmering across her round, rainbow-bejeweled glasses.
The snakeskin-print shirt she wore resembled the wet specimens in the jars in the back of the room, and the scent of nail polish remover hung in the air. “I’m able to express myself in art on tiny canvases, as fingernails, and then I’ve got my section back there.”
Wright explained that her family moved from Gastonia to Morganton when she was 7 years old. A lover of animals, she’d pick up lizards and frogs and other wildlife from the yard and woods to take home and keep as pets — a habit she never lost over the years.
“As an adult, my husband, at first, was not into the reptiles,” Wright said. “It was all I could do to get him to let me have a pet cat. He’s learned to love me for what it is. … I’ve got snakes, tarantulas, frogs, bearded dragons, tortoises, dogs, (and) we had a cat. I have my own little zoo and it’s my happy place to feed them and take care of them.”
When she gets home from the salon, animal husbandry can take her up to an hour.
She began working at the salon not long after graduating from Freedom High School, and when the previous owners decided to sell, she and her mother bought it.
“I went to this big convention that they do in Charlotte, the Oddities and Curiosities Expo. I just fell in love with absolutely everything. Their prices are high, but it’s in the Charlotte area. I had wanted all kinds of things but was like, ‘I’m not spending hundreds of dollars on things like this.’”
“I was like, ‘I’m artsy, surely I can make something like that.’ So, that’s what I started doing. I researched the process on how to do all the different kinds.”
She then set up the section in the back of the salon about a year and a half ago, first selling art like hand-made snake-shed necklaces before bringing in the larger items.
Wright’s careful to emphasize that everything is ethically sourced — she’s made friends with local pet stores, farmers, and hunters who reach out when an animal passes away — she’s worked with everything from roadkill to the fetuses of cows going to the slaughterhouse.
“Death, it happens,” she said. “Animals don’t thrive sometimes, so they just throw it in the freezer and save it for me. … I’m not a hunter, for one thing. I’m definitely not a person that’s going out and torturing animals. I’m more so here for the preservation of the beauty of the animal. Not everything has to be dark and creepy.”
Although she started making art as a surrealist painter, Wright’s heart lies in wet specimen work — preserving animals and animal fetuses in formaldehyde before transferring them to containers filled with alcohol. She never really got into taxidermy in the traditional sense.
Her favorite animals to work with are snakes, hence the logo of Oddly Beautiful Creations being a snake between two hands covered in jewelry.
She has two pet ball pythons, and when they pass, she’ll put them in a jar and preserve their bodies alongside the other organisms floating near the back of the shop, and often underneath tent awnings at events such as the Lenoir’s Carolina Tattoos and Arts Gathering.
The way Wright sees it, between the pieces she creates and the pet memorials she makes for people, she’s just bridging the gap between “average art” and more “odd, strange, eclectic art.”
“This is one of the ways I like to express myself,” Wright explained. “It’s just getting that point across to people that it’s not scary. It’s not animal cruelty. It’s intriguing and preservation and beauty. That’s where I came up with the name, Oddly Beautiful Creations.”
