102 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM his volunteer experience walking a 260-pound jaguar on a leash at a Bolivian animal-rehab center. “Rupi was a magnificent creature with incredible cinder block jaws and a telephone pole upper body,” Thayer describes. “He wiped me across the jungle for two weeks.” Day one on the job was particularly memorable: “He literally wrapped my head in his jaws!” “Thayer’s whole mentality of, ‘Here’s the ideas I have—who’s going to come and be equally excited about these ideas and bring them to the world?’ was a whole different way of thinking that I, at the time, absolutely did not know how to do, and frankly, didn’t even think was possible,” Jane rejoins. Later, she would crowdfund her first Migrating Mural project through Kickstarter, painting a series of six murals devoted to the Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep along the Eastern Sierra and Highway 395. The project’s success landed her another job, this time painting 243 life-sized birds over a 70 by 40 foot wall at Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Taking nearly a year and a half to paint, it remains among Jane’s proudest work, even inspiring an artful coffee table book that Thayer wrote. “The Wall of Birds was Thayer’s and my first real collaboration as something we put into the world together,” Jane says. “I love that both our names are on it.” Murals weren’t the initial plan, Jane says, but they equipped her to reach a heartfelt goal: dialoguing with the public as opposed to solely the fine art community. “Murals became a canvas for storytelling,” she describes. Thayer adds, “We’ve found these static objects have the ability to create really dynamic movements and engagement that PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY OF INK DWELL ABOVE: Le Papillon
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