Framed poster
This framed Arctic fox poster arrives already framed, ready to hang from a nail: a fox facing forward, in a knit sweater and pulled-down beanie, holding your gaze against a plain background. It's Otto, a character from my Animal Kinhood series.
Vulpes lagopus
Cold teaches you to listen. Everything else is noise.
Circumpolar arctic and alpine tundra: coasts and interior of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Iceland and Svalbard. It is Iceland's only native land mammal.
In his story, Otto senses what's beneath the surface: a belt about to snap before it snaps, footsteps upstairs, whether someone is lying by their tone rather than their words. It's a sharp hearing he can't switch off, useful sometimes and too much other times. The portrait doesn't tell you any of that; it only shows his calm face, facing forward, with amber eyes and a navy-blue beanie. What's underneath, I tell you separately, in his story.
Otto is one of the Animal Kinhood characters, my series of animals with clothes and a trade; in his case, a fox who sorts fish in a minus-twenty cold-storage room in northern Norway. Framed, he has exactly the right presence: when someone walks into the room, the first thing they do is look at him. He works well in an entryway or a hallway you pass through, without fighting anything around him. If you like how he brings order to a wall instead of just decorating it, you'll find the whole series — also available framed — in the shop.
