In spring 2026 I started a guerilla art project to install roadside shrines to the innumerable animals killed by vehicles in central Illinois. The shrines were made of cast concrete, painted gold, with a framed photo of the animal that was killed and some fake flowers. I was interested in challenging our sense of the value of other-than-human life by using methods and imagery we use to memorialize people who have been lost to traffic accidents. This was as much a social experiment as it was an art project. I did not intend it as simply a prank, but was very serious about perceptions of the animals and plants that live in our shared, human-built environments

I created a number of shrines and placed them in the trunk of my car along with a packet of animals commonly found dead on the roadside and fake flower for adorning the shrines. Upon discovery of a dead animal, I would dress in "road worker" high visibility vest and hat and place the shrine. Soon after starting to place shrines in Champaign Illinois the local press noticed them and wrote some articles about these "mystery shrines." Although I have not placed any shrines in many years, the project has gotten some good attention with writing about it included in the books The Urban Naturalist: How To Make The City Your Scientific Playground by Menno Schithuizen, Displaying Death and Animating Life: Human-Animal Relations in Art, Science and Everyday Life (Animal Lives) by Jane Desmond, University of Chicago Press 2016, and Environmental Anthropology, Ed. Helen Kopina and Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet, Routledge Press.