Her studio is a place of alchemy. The room is large, the corniced ceiling high, the windows tall and the light benign. There are grand glass fronted cupboards containing the skulls of birds, rabbits, a long-horned chamois, a stuffed cockatoo, an enormous star fish, a conch, fossils, the hip bone of an ass, the jaw bone of a Scottish Blackface sheep and the skeletal head of a peacock as well as a black and white photograph of Lucien Freud shaving. She removes the peacock’s head.