Judgmental Fossa Bottle Stopper

Fossa bottle stopper (wee bottle not included). Head is 3″ ear-to-ear and feels solid (but isn’t).

I’m not quite sure what this animal is, but googling “animals with round ears” brought up Fossa, which Wikipedia says is Madagascar’s largest carnivorous mammal: “They look like a cross between a cat, a dog, and a mongoose.” That works for me.

Since March of 2020, I have been involved in a collaborative math-art installation called Mathemalchemy. Among my many tasks: create a ceramic head for Arnold the Cat (named for mathematician Vladimir Arnold), who bakes tessellating pi cookies. What I learned: cats are harder to make than birds. This is in part because I live with cats, and they judge me and my art. All the time. It took me several attempts to approach cat-ness. This bottle stopper is an early attempt, and it decided it would rather be a bear or a kangaroo or a fossa than a domestic cat. It looks judgmental, an attitude it clearly absorbed from me and my cats, Schroeder and Fang.