When Lisa Laurén gets a request for an animal costume head, she said, “it’s kind of like I’m going on a play date.”
Using her imagination, resources and hands, Laurén crafts animal heads that are vivid, colorful and eye-catching.
“I’m trying to condense somebody else’s dream and make it into something,” Laurén said from the kitchen of her high-ceilinged apartment on a leafy street near the Spree River in Berlin. A clay fox head covered tightly with foil stood on a large tray, awaiting its next phase of creation.
The animal heads are an offshoot of Laurén’s main job as a freelance textile artist, a role that includes painting backdrops for staged productions and helping develop costumes for television, film and theater. She has worked for an array of clients including Netflix, Apple TV+, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Tate Museum in London, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Laurén has been making animal costume heads for theater, opera and artistic performances since 2011, when the Komische Oper Berlin commissioned her and a close collaborator, Benjamin Tyrrell, to make a set for a staging of Leos Janacek’s 1923 opera, “The Cunning Little Vixen,” in which many characters are forest animals.
“It’s not really a prop, it’s not really makeup, and costume makers don’t have experience making items like this,” Laurén said.
On a sunny weekend in mid-February, Laurén took a seat at a desk covered in art supplies to demonstrate her process by replicating the fox heads that she was commissioned to make for the Biennale of Sydney in 2024. The room, awash in natural light, doubles as the spacious living room in the apartment she shares with her husband and two children.
On the wall in front of her, she’d tacked up visual representations of different animals. Laurén explained that the eyes of the human wearing the head must land beneath the chin of the fox; otherwise, the neck of the fox would look squished.
Soaked with hot water, the mesh over the head softened, draping to fit the contours of the fox’s nose, forehead and eyes. Within minutes, the mesh cooled, hardening into the base layer of an elaborate, furry head to top an animal costume.
The artists Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano wore Laurén’s fox heads — along with fox costumes produced by a collective of costume and set designers called Werkstattkollektiv — for a performance art piece in the Biennale of Sydney last year about the role of foxes in urban environments. Halilaj recently commissioned Laurén to create another fox head for an opera.
“They don’t have a really clear, fixed idea how they want them to look, so it’s kind of like this playful dialogue in a way,” Laurén said of working with the artists.
Laurén grew up in a Swedish commune on an island near Stockholm. Her mother was an animator and prop maker for a theater, and her father was a musician and light technician.
Seeing her parents and their artsy friends solve problems creatively, Laurén learned to work with her hands.
“I was never afraid to drill holes, or build something, or try new things, or get out of the box,” she said. “I wasn’t afraid to work with my hands.”
She applies this can-do attitude to creating the animal heads, which range from 2,200 to 3,000 euro, or $2,500 to $3,500. One head takes Laurén about two to three weeks to create.
When the thermoplastic mesh base of the fox head was completely firm, Laurén sewed soft leather around the base’s edges to protect it as well as the wearer’s skin. Afterward, she sewed on acrylic faux fur. The fur is different for each animal; once she used fur that expensive teddy bears are made of. Another time, the fur for a bear head was hand-knit.
After the fur was in place, she trimmed the hairs to create a shape — for example, the face of the fox has shorter hairs than the neck and the sides.
For research, she visits natural history museums, browses fabric samples at specialty shops, searches books for images of ancient animal masks, and checks cosplay forums.
“It’s more a perception of what they look like,” Laurén said. “This is not scientific; it’s intuitive.”
Still, the heads must fulfill certain specifications. For the fox head, the performer inside breathes and looks outward from beneath the animal’s nose. Laurén said the heads for Halilaj and Urbano also “have to be sturdy enough to travel the world for different installations and performances. And they have to be able to wash them.”
“If you put a real fox next to it, it doesn’t look real,” Laurén said, smiling. “But they look real in their human expression.”
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