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NEW YORK (TNA) – “Treat that box of dead fish like a lady.”

Words of wisdom – and caution – from Nate Hill, artist and rogue taxidermist, to any who might follow in his morbidly creative path.

Artist and self-proclaimed 'rogue taxidermist' Nate Hill examines a creature he assembled from found body parts.

Hill, 30, is the proud leader of the Brooklyn, N.Y., chapter of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists, a group dedicated to finding beauty in the offal.

Rogue Taxidermy is, according to Hill, “outlaw taxidermy. Taxidermy that doesn’t follow the traditional rules. Preserving wildlife with a nontraditional slant.” It is, in fact, a subversion of the core purpose of taxidermy. Rather than restoring a faux dignity or beauty to the slaughtered, skinned and stuffed animal, the rogues glorify its awesome rawness.

And so Hill prowls the dead-fish boxes, noisome dumpsters and assorted leavings of the raw/live food merchants around New York’s Chinatown, probing very carefully in his rubber gloves through many men’s garbage for one man’s gold.

When he finds his spoils – fish carcasses, frog heads, chicken cadavers, even a 7-inch shark’s head on one happy occasion – he returns to his Brooklyn lab/apartment and creates “carcass art.”

As for display, it’s all available on Hill’s YouTube video show Chop Chop.

“Usually I’ll take a bunch of animal parts and cut them up,” he says, “and spontaneously try to improvise an animal while my friends narrate. And afterwards we have a party. So it’s like a social thing.”

However, he’s yet to exhibit in a formal gallery. “Uh, the art world has not yet caught onto this,” he adds, laughing.

But Hill isn’t laughing alone. The M.A.R.T. is comprised of a dozen members of like-minded souls, soi disant “beast blenders” who have exhibited from Iowa to Maine. Members of the M.A.R.T. have displayed such nightmare splicings as a vampire squirrel, a two-headed chick, a “goth griffin” made from a cat and a crow, and all manner of mythological miscreations.