KULCHA!

Meet the world's first—and only—cat and mouse armorer. Artist Jeff de Boer has designed and crafted more than 500 tiny museum-quality suits of animal armor for decades. https://t.co/6aFadchwSU

Photos by Christie Hemm Klok pic.twitter.com/3r3lNP1jSC

— National Geographic (@NatGeo) January 15, 2023

“I always joke that when I made the first suit of mouse armor, in a millisecond I also became the greatest mouse armorer in the history of mankind,” says Jeff de Boer, a Canadian artist who has designed and crafted museum-quality armor for cats and mice for 36 years.

Over that time, de Boer estimates he’s created more than 500 suits of animal armor in his Calgary studio, ranging from rodent-size Crusader armor complete with tiny snout-nosed helmets and tail scales, to elaborate medieval Islamic chainmail large enough for your average house cat…

De Boer’s inspiration began with a visit to the armor collection at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum when he was five years old. “I think that at a very early age children recognize armor as something interesting, and for me it was really haunting,” the 59-year-old artist recalls. “How was this made? Who wore it? Why did they wear it? What were the experiences that that armor had? Those thoughts and ideas have been with me my entire life.”

De Boer started tooling around in his father’s metal fabrication shop and made his first human-size suit of armor in high school. But as a jewelry major in art school in the mid-1980s, he had to somehow reconcile the small scale of the items he was creating with his passion for armor. He could craft armor for people at a miniature size, but that felt inauthentic. What sort of relatively tiny armor could he create that still felt like it had a real purpose?…

The Armor for Cats and Mice series is just one of a number of works by de Boer—he also creates jewelry, large public sculptures, and even funeral urns—but the animal armor remains closest to his heart with its particular focus on history and archaeology.

Once de Boer determines the culture and timeframe for an armor project, he conducts extensive research on armament styles of the time, then draws the concept by hand. He then crafts clay models from the drawings, which help him draft exact patterns for each of some 30-200 separate metal elements that the armor may require. (A Roman gladiator mouse, for example, may be made of 50 different parts, while scaled cat armor may have 500.)…

Since the artist works on a miniature scale, he creates his own tiny tools and rivets to fashion the armor elements. It can take 40 hours just to make the roughly 5 to 10 custom tools needed to create a particular style of mouse armor, then an additional 30-50 hours to create each mouse. Most are crafted from nickel, steel, and/or brass (and sometimes gold or platinum), and finished with flourishes like whiskers or tassels.

De Boer isn’t concerned that 3D printing will make his work obsolete; rather, he’s cheered by the number of artisans and collectors who follow his work on social media and are inspired to keep the metallurgy craft alive for future generations…

The requests are always individual and very personal. In the case of cat armor, the request is often to memorialize a beloved pet who has passed away. De Boer incorporates the individual stories of the animals into this work, making the armor a sort of portrait or even reliquary of each one. He also occasionally creates armor for other species, like the samurai dog helmet commissioned by a police officer to capture the “warrior spirit” of his retired four-legged partner.

The patrons for his mouse armor find inspiration everywhere and sometimes ask for types of armor that have never been seen on human battlefields. De Boer is currently working on a commission from an Indian-Polish couple that combines elements of 17th-century armor from both the Indian Maratha Empire and the Polish Hussars. “Something I would never think to do,” he concedes, “but it’s exciting because you have these two cultures, and you are doing the research and you discover they’re both contemporary.”…

De Boer stresses that his work is not intended to be worn by living animals, describing the first and last time he was asked to dress a cat in armor. It was for a Japanese game show in the early 1990s, and a television crew showed up at his studio with a “stunt cat” that was allegedly very comfortable wearing clothes on camera. “Let’s just say that we had a very large cat in a very small suit of armor,” he says. “Highly not recommended.”…

There’s a ton of amazing photos at the link!