I’m having the most extraordinary creative relationship with Penelope Jane Ross. We’ve never met, but the friendship that’s developed from our exchanges at Insta ‘direct messaging’ have coalesced into the most beautiful range of glass pieces, made by Jane using source drawings of mine, now emerged as a range of pieces under the name Glassworlds.
What I enjoy about this so much, is the translation required when Jane sets about adapting a drawing into a relief-model sculpted from Plasticene. The model is then cast as a plaster mould, filled with glass chips and placed in a kiln, emerging transformed as a coloured glass version of her original sculpt.
It’s one thing to realise a flat drawing made in a folk-art idiom into a free-standing, bas-relief sculpt, but an even more extraordinary one when the sculpt is transformed into coloured glass, with the flows, eddies and bubbles of its liquid form hardened into a material so distant from the graphite and paper of the origin art. Something flat and graphic turned into shimmer and gleam and transparency, the patterning becoming a sort of brocade stitched out of light.
The early pieces made were on a small scale and quite soft in their modelling so that the results, cast in aqua blues and greens, were reminiscent of sea-glass. The effect was dreamier than my crisp and graphic drawings, and had the results been placed at the bottom of a well or scattered in the stones and silt of a stream-bed, it would have been easy to mistake them as dating back a hundred years or more. Some, like the cavalryman below cast in rose pink, had opalescent depths.
First Jane made animals and items I’d drawn out of my love for vintage Erzgebirge, the region of Germany famous for its wooden toys. But quite quickly I got to thinking that maybe the cast of characters would sit well within a setting, so I made drawings of toy houses and trees for her to sculpt.
At my Insta page I began to describe the colours in terms of being edible: the rose of Turkish Delight, the citrus fruits of boiled sweets and the greens of pistachios.
Jane devised self-coloured pedestals that were added, so the flat-backed pieces could stand, ideally placed where the light could shine through them.
As the project evolved – and with a bit of technical advice from my frequent collaborator David W. Slack – Jane began making positive casts of the original Plasticene sculpts. These positive casts permitted multiple plaster negative moulds to be made from them. While the plaster moulds are always destroyed in the process of removing the cast glass figurines, there’s no longer the problem that for every plaster cast there’s a lost Plasticene sculpt. Now Jane has positive casts that can be used to generate multiple plaster moulds, and she doesn’t have to make a new Plasticene sculpt for every glass cast.
A new development has been the introduction of vibrant colours, and the recent work emerging from the kilns is as richly hued as anything you might see in the window of one of the great cathedrals. The modelling has become crisper, and as a result the decorative surfaces are more sharply defined. I love both the earlier, slightly dreamier figurines, and these fruit-drop coloured beauties, equally. Creativity needs to evolve as the artist explores all options, and the latest version is just different to the last, not a replacement.
The original drawings had been made for my friend Gloria at Sussex Lustreware for a new range of lustreware ceramic titled Summer. The goat, cavalryman on a wheeled horse and dog had already appeared on the lustreware at the time Jane was trying them out in glass form.
Soon I was producing new drawings for Jane with the express intention of them becoming elements in the Glassworlds series. The arched building and the cat below were both made for Jane, but then transmigrated to the lustreware. The traffic flows in both directions.
See more of Glassworlds at Jane’s website and shop
In 2019 Olivia Ahmad wrote about Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ explorations of Hansel & Gretel for Varoom magazine.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ retellings of classic fairy tale Hansel & Gretel have an edge. Taking in the original tale’s horrific neglect, abuse and murder, Clive has adapted the story into a picture book, toy theatre and original stage production. Olivia Ahmad looks at Clive’s startling manifestations of the familiar story.
“The boy was called Hansel, the girl was called Gretel – hence the title, Hansel & Gretel.” So the narrator opened Clive Hicks-Jenkins’ 2018 staging of his version of the European folk tale, first recorded by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. The performance had the subtitle a nightmare in eight scenes, which undermined any notion that Clive’s combination of animation and puppetry would be a saccharine adaptation of the story of the witch who tempts two lost children into her house made of gingerbread. “It’s a dark and brutal story”, he says, “the mother has been cruel and treacherous, and is dead by the time the children return home, with no explanation of what happened to her. Gretel has killed the witch in the most dreadful manner, which is not just something you can brush aside. There will be psychological scars. So the story is odd and downright nasty and has too often been glossed in endless re-tellings. It was just too good a chance to miss.”
Clive first took up the chance to envision the story for a book in 2012, inspired by a childhood memory. “I had a Toby Twirl annual,” he explains. “There was a story of a witch who captured Toby and imprisoned him. The pictures of her terrified and enthralled me. She stuck like a burr in my imagination and she’s been there ever since. When in an idle moment some years ago I felt the need to be drawing a witch, I chose Hansel & Gretel as the vehicle simply because a witch was central to the plot. I painted the characters onto a set of enamelware plates for a bit of fun, for no other purpose than for use at home. And in so doing, I laid the foundations for the larger project, though I didn’t know it at the time.”
The plate designs, produced with hand-cut stencils reminiscent of European folk art, migrated from Clive’s kitchen shelves in 2014 when he adapted them into a series of illustrations for Random Spectacular magazine. After a passing comment at social media that he would like to expand the magazine piece into a picture book, Random Spectacular agreed to publish one. Clive envisioned a dark tale, one that asked difficult questions: “What happens to children who kill? What effect will it have on them?”
The character design of the siblings was vital to telling their story: “The children that I designed right at the start were really simple. There was a touch of St Trinian’s to them: short and pod-like with skinny arms and legs and dressed in school uniforms. Though caricatured there was a tenderness and bewilderment to them that was touching. Hansel is incredibly passive throughout, a poor lost puppy. Gretel appears meek, though later manifests an awesome inner Ninja.”
Alongside the cast of characters appear occasional motifs drawn from European toys and popular design ephemera that Clive has gathered over the years. “It’s not exactly a collection”, he explains, “but a loose gathering of objects that interest, intrigue and move me. Some inherited and some sought. I find that vintage toys worm their ways into my imagination and from there into my work.” While these elements represented a personal history, moments like Hansel and Gretel making their getaway with the aid of a duck based on a 1950s Fisher Price pull-toy, make Clive’s fantasy world uncannily familiar.
For the rendering of the book Clive made separations, a technique previously unfamiliar to him. Creating a drawing for each coloured layer of an illustration, the layers of drawings were then scanned and coloured digitally according to Pantone references he selected to create a sugared almond palette.
The Random Spectacular picture book was published in 2016, and the same year Clive was commissioned for another Hansel & Gretel project by Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden, which sells historic and contemporary cut-out-and-assemble toy theatres. The commission to create the Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre resonated with Clive’s childhood: “As a boy I’d cut out, coloured in and performed Pollock’s productions on a home-made stage constructed from a cornflakes packet, and so this was a dream come true for me.”
He initially suggested an adaptation of his Hansel & Gretel picture book, and while the Pollock’s project went on to incorporate some of the atmosphere of it, many of the more grotesque elements were considered “way too scary” for the toy theatre’s intended family audience. So Clive embarked on yet another adaptation of the story, re-fashioning it to create a meta- production in miniature, perhaps informed by his early career as a performer: The Pollock’s Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre starts from the point where the picture book finishes. “Having survived the ordeal of the witch, the children leave home to make their way in the world. Arriving in the big city they’re picked up by a theatre impresario who promises fame and fortune if they sign a contact with him, and they duly end up starring in a pantomime version of their own story, though with most of the unpalatable bits edited out.
So no wicked mother ending up being murdered by their father, and a much tamer version of a witch who doesn’t have tentacles where her nose should be!” The performance takes place at the fictional ‘Theatre Royal, Jury Lane’, a play on word of London’s Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.
The Benjamin Pollock’s Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre was published in 2017, and while light-hearted in tone, it retained some of the gothic horror of the picture book with its poisonous candy blues and pinks overlaid with a blanket of dark pencil hatching. The flatpack consists of a stage, proscenium arch, scenes, characters and props, along with a script and a poster to ‘advertise’ the production.
The following year, Clive’s Hansel & Gretel: a nightmare in eight scenes premiered on a life-size stage at the Cheltenham Music Festival. It subsequently toured the UK, finishing at the Barbican in London where a performance was recorded for broadcast Christmas week 2018 on BBC Radio 3.
For this his largest imagining of the story – a combination of live narration, music, animation and tabletop and shadow-screen puppetry – Clive collaborated with producer Kate Romano and the Goldfield Ensemble. The producer had originally visited Clive to discuss another project, but after seeing his Pollock’s designs suggested they make a music theatre production about the ill-fated brother and sister.
Clive recommended the producer enlist the poet Simon Armitage to write the libretto. Simon took the story in a completely different direction by placing the children into a contemporary context. “I think it was genius on Simon’s part to set the story in a conflict zone, and to rewrite the adults as loving parents fearful that their children might become casualties of war,” Clive says. “That changed everything for me in terms of how we relate to the family. They’re not dysfunctional, but find themselves in terrible circumstances.” The performance opened with animations of marching toy soldiers, which soon fall into the disarray of battle. Hansel and Gretel’s parents send their children away from this carnage in order to protect them.
However without their parents’ protection, they become enticed and ensnared by a witch. When she prepares to bathe them so they can be trafficked, Gretel fears that the hot water for the bath will be used for boiling them alive. “Everything that we see and hear is filtered through the overheated imaginations of the children who are full of fears and misunderstandings,” Clive explains.
“Everything in the production, from the predatory witch and her grubby icing-sugared cottage, to the layout of its bleak interior conjured from a doll’s house, is how they see things.”
Hansel and Gretel were puppets designed by Clive and made by Jan Zalud. “I needed the puppets to function at a different level to their picture book counterparts, and be fully up to the emotional requirements of Simon Armitage’s text, ” Clive says, and his designs evolved from research on the experiences of children in transit camps. This approach was not welcomed by the Goldfield ‘project team’, who reported his drawings made them think of children in concentration camps. “I stuck to my guns,” he remembers, “because I knew the direction was the right one.”
Only one Hansel and one Gretel puppet appeared in the production, so the design and execution created appropriately neutral expressions for the puppet’s faces onto which many thoughts could be projected by audiences. Because the streaming would see them much magnified on the screen, they’d need an innate grace of movement so the moments of tenderness and vulnerability would withstand close scrutiny.
Several collaborators were assembled and directed by Clive to realise the project. The composer Matt Kaner had come to it through Kate Romano. Clive invited Peter Lloyd to produce shadow puppets of the children’s parents and the witch, Pete Telfer, to film the animations to be projected onto the stage, and his regular collaborator and assistant Phil Cooper, to be in charge of the model sets and painted backgrounds for the puppets. Puppeteer Di Ford came to the project at Clive’s invitation having previously worked with him on the stage production of The Mare’s Tale, and after a puppeteer audition and workshop, Lizzie Wort joined the company. Costumier Oonagh Creighton Griffiths was brought in to dress the puppets.
As director of such a broad team, how did Clive retain his vision of the piece? His earlier career was in stage direction and choreography, and so he knows his choice of collaborators is vital. “I mostly work with people I know well and feel at ease with,” he says, “the team are my professional family. When we’re all pulling together there’s not really a hierarchy. Once briefed I trust them. Sometimes they bring me what I expect, and occasionally there are surprises. There need to be the possibilities that some elements may exceed my expectations or bring something entirely unanticipated.”
Clive’s own vintage toys played an important role onstage. One hundred year old German building blocks became the playthings of the children, and clockwork ‘pecking chickens’ stood in for the flock of birds that ate Hansel’s trail of breadcrumbs.
The chickens and a Russian clockwork ‘singing’ bird are also due to appear in Clive’s next iteration of the story: a richly illustrated edition of Simon Armitage’s libretto, produced by independent publisher Design for Today and due for release later this year.
“A toy,” Clive says, “can open your heart and make you remember what wonder feels like.” However his adoption of these tokens from the past is not an indulgence in nostalgia. “I’m not such a fool as to think that yesterday was better. I was there and it wasn’t! My explorations are all about objects being repositories of histories. They’re like radio dials, and if you twiddle them you ‘hear’ the past. That past can be anything, from sweet to despairing. It’s the focus that’s all important, and what the focus opens in the mind and heart.”
Olivia Ahmad, 2019.
Hansel & Gretel was published subsequent to this article and in 2020 won the V&A Illustrated Book Award. It’s still available from the publisher at THIS LINK. In October a new hardback edition is due out from Faber & Faber.
Above, the 2019 Design for Today edition of Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes, and below, the new edition forthcoming from Faber & Faber in October 2023.
Please Click on the title above to watch the videos embedded in this post.
Above: click to view the book trailer for Beowulf
Clive: David, you were undertaking trial digital work for me while I was working on the illustrations for Beowulf. I made them in black ink on white board, but had it in mind to see how they’d look when inverted to white on black. What you produced provided me with inverted images of drawings and digital colourings of them throughout all the earlier stages of the book’s creation. Although the final additions of colour were done at Folio Society, you did all the preliminary ‘tests’ that enabled me to make the decisions ready to brief the Folio team.
Above: detail of illustration from the book after image inversion and digital colouring by Folio Society.
Below: original ink artwork on mountboard with pencil trim guide, before inversion and colouring.
David: Oh it was such a joy to have a private viewing of your Beowulf drawings, and because I was messing around with them digitally, I could easily produce many different versions. It was fascinating wasn’t it, that some worked instantly as inverted images, while others were more powerful as you’d drawn them?
Above: finished ink drawings piling up on the artist’s desk.
Clive: In the end we included some drawings as made and some inverted. The combination worked well.
David: I made some red versions which were just OK, but I remember layering a deep spot-lit blue-green with the image for the first time, and it pulsed and sang immediately.
Below: trial colour images of inversions made by David.
But I think you had committed to the blue at that point, and the intensely saturated blue-on-black and black-on-blue that their production manager achieved in print for your full-bleed double-page illustrations, is way beyond anything I’ve ever seen in print. I’ve done a lot of printmaking through the years, but how they achieved that glowing deepest blue is beyond me. It pulses with some sort of other life and is just unforgettable. I know that you were blown away by the book when you saw it.
Clive: I couldn’t stop shaking when I received and opened my copy. I was anxious because I knew by this point the edition was printed, bound and boxed, and there could be no turning back. I’d seen many page proofs over the months, but between the last proof seen and the finished book the production manager had worked miracles. I was simply speechless when I saw the the quality of the printing.
Because of your contributions at preliminary stages, and because you knew the illustrations inside out, it was inevitable that at some point we’d start talking about the potential of the images to be animated into life, and that’s exactly what happened.
David: Well of course, what a gift this was! Your drawings for Beowulf were in a paper-cut style, and so ready-made for shadow theatre puppetry. I’d learned to animate a while back when we’d made an animated film to promote the Design for Today Beauty and BeastToy Theatre. With that experience under my belt, how difficult could it be to create a three or four second animation as a test run for a potential Beowulf book-trailer? I have to say that it was BLOODY difficult. I’m pretty sure that the learning curve was so steep that at more than one point my neuron’s firing registered on Google Earth. But anyway, this idea of a moment of animation er… well, it snowballed rather didn’t it?
Above: articulated paper maquette made as a compositional aid during the early stages of planning the book.
David: Much of your preparatory-stage work for illustration is built upon the idea of the jointed maquette, so animation is a perfect fit. And of course you’ve made many frame animations in the past, for example on your stage productions of Hansel and Gretel and The Soldiers Tale. By now you and I had made many animations together, almost all set within the bounds of a toy theatre. The images of Beowulf were so exciting to imagine unshackled and animated into life. They were perfectly suited to the medium.
Clive: Because we felt some animation sequences could enhance the promotional video Folio would be sure to make to launch the book, I decided to ask them whether they might consider permitting us to submit a couple of trial animation sequences by way of introducing the team to the idea. Luckily they were open to that and you began work almost immediately.
I recall conversations we had about the ‘character’ of the animation, degrading the imagery to make it look almost like ‘found footage’ with that sense of vintage film scratchiness and fluttering. You might have different recollections to me, but among references we discussed there was the idea to animate the dragon almost as if it were some kind of nematode worm being filmed on a slide under a microscope. I think I may have mentioned the title sequence for the film Seven to you, with its sense of flickering unease. And then of course there was our shared passion for Smallfilms and the work of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin. It’s just not possible to be in a world of Norsemen without having a conversation about Noggin the Nog.
David: Ah yes! The David Fincher/Smallfilms mash up. I loved your suggestion of a squirming dragon as a micro-organism under magnification. It adds an edge of discomfort to see inserts of a different texture, speed and animation style within the piece. I used the same concept in the jerking movements of the wolf and the tentacles whenever they appear.
Above: black original ink drawing and the digital translation to colour in the book.
David: Tonal changes are essential to my mind, especially when the piece is very dark, or heavily stylised. The most incredible imagery in a movie can actually become dull after a while, unless the viewer is shaken out of it – like a little hit of spice. I watched versions of scenes of the Beowulf animation without the degrading filters we talked about. Your drawings moving across the screen were so striking without the added optical effects that I found it tough to dull them down. Nevertheless I added scratchy inclusions of scrabbling colour to make the films glow and dull in turn, and the decision worked wonders in unifying the animations and the sequences of the book itself. One of the things I had to keep reminding myself was that this wasn’t a trailer for a movie, but for a beautiful book. (The Hitchcock in me was forever edging it to a movie trailer.)
Clive: We waited with bated breath once the sample shots had been delivered to the Folio team, but when the responses came they were wholeheartedly enthusiastic. Far from delivering a few short cuts to be edited into a promotional film, we were tasked with producing the whole shebang. After a briefing Zoom with the team at Folio we got working. There were to be 2 x 30 second films, one at a format for viewing on smart-phones, and a second for viewing on laptops and tablets.
David: Oh weren’t they wonderful? They showed such faith in us that I did feel confident about how it would turn out. Working with such carefully considered and rendered drawings I knew the results would be beautiful. Like cooking with the best ingredients. Although the brief was for 30 second films, I overshot and both edits came in at one minute and six seconds. I think just over the minute stands up very well. I would have been pushed to get the pace right in 30 second films.
Clive: I agree. 30 seconds would have been too rushed. As the films stand, each at just over a minute, they fly by when watching them.
As with all our animation projects, once we’d discussed I absented myself to concentrate on sourcing the music. You in the meantime were off like a rocket. I remember your utter confidence that you knew where to go with all this, waiting only on the music to provide the structures to the films. You were not just animator on the project working to my brief. You were now Animation Producer!
David: And a very cocky one at that, due in no small part to the confidence and enthusiasm you demonstrated in allowing me to hack up and rearrange your artworks.
While you researched the music, I got busy anatomising your Beowulf characters to assemble a cache of puppet elements. You always show an astonishing faith in me to infill the drawings when I amputate an arm, head or leg, or need to find fingers or a neck. I in turn feel safe in the knowledge that you’ll always find the perfect piece of music which will make the pace, depth and rhythm of the story appear clearly in my head. This time you found four tracks, one of which though amazing, we both thought a little too disturbing. (Maybe it’ll be right at another time for another film.) I viewed the films hundreds of times when making them, and have watched them many times since completion. I’m confident the two music pieces we settled on had just the right aesthetic, power, drive and primal drama. People report that they watch them repeatedly, and a big part of that is because the music makes them so moreish.
Above: click to view this animated book-trailer for the new Folio Society edition of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf.
On June 27th Folio Society will be launching their ‘special edition’ of Beowulf, translated by Seamus Heaney and illustrated by me. Heralding this are two animated films to celebrate the event, produced by my regular collaborator of the past few years, David W. Slack. David is a painter in his own right, and it’s his breadth of knowledge and practice as an artist which strongly underpins what we make together. We first collaborated when I asked him to construct preliminary models for the Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre Kit I was preparing for publisher Joe Pearson at Design for Today. In this first of two recent ‘conversations’, David and I track how he went from model designer on Beauty & Beast to being appointed Animation Producer on Beowulf.
Clive: David, I first came across images of yours at Insta when you were ‘enhancing’ your copy of the Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre I’d designed for Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop. What first struck me was how good a model-maker you were, followed swiftly by how improved the model was by the curved stage-front you were adding to it. “Damn it!”, was my initial response. “I wish I’d thought of that.”
Above: David’s ‘improved’ Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre, with the footlights and curved stage-front he added.
David: That model was really lovely. When it arrived I was amazed at how few sheets you’d managed to condense the entire story into, yet when cut and assembled it became a very layered and complex model. You sent me the additional scan of the stage floor so that I could print the floorboards I needed for my planned stage extension.
Clive: For the record you’re a better model-maker than I am, and I remain envious of your framed model of the adapted Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre complete with lights and curved apron. Overworked as I was by this point, the idea of inviting you to collaborate on the Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre was already churning away in my head keeping me awake at nights.
David: I’d seen an Insta post of a beautiful architectural doorway you’d made for Beauty & Beast flanked by sinister white-eyed caryatids. Having contacted you to ask how you’d feel about my interpreting the idea into a painted wardrobe, you were extremely encouraging.
Below: preliminary work on an illustration of a garden door in Beast’s realm.
When I ventured further and wrote that a toy theatre might be fun, you admitted you were planning one, had a preliminary dummy on your desk at that very moment and were wondering whether I might help with it. After that it was just a case of me trying to jump onto the already speeding train!
Your work on the book of Beauty & Beast with writer Olivia McCannon was already well underway, and although that collaboration was quite separate to the toy theatre, the two projects were clearly intended to be viewed as a pair. From the start your advice to me was to “do less”, and it was much needed as my first response was to turn the model into the toy theatre equivalent of a big old Busby Berkeley number in a Hollywood musical. Fortunately, better understanding that a lighter touch benefits toy theatre, you stayed my hand. More sketches went back and forth to get us to the same starting point, and thereafter everything was much clearer. I outlined my understanding of my role as the facilitating designer who’d translate your evolving illustrations for the book into a working toy theatre model.
Clive: And that was a good starting point for both of us, though in fact your role quickly became much more than that of model designer. With sections of Olivia’s text for Beauty & Beast arriving daily I was up to my eyes in keeping apace with my illustration schedule, so it was a relief that you were able to efficiently keep me up to speed with what you needed for the model and when. You’d effectively become the project manager.
David: Once bedded in I began to lobby for an increase to the six construction sheets you’d advised were the maximum we could afford for the model. I hope I wasn’t too pushy.
Clive: I saw it more as a case of your enthusiasm for what we were making. However while excited by what was emerging from your desk, I was growing slightly anxious about the implications for the budget. It was time to explain to Joe the publisher that I’d gained a collaborator, and to sound him out regarding expanding the project from six to ten sheets. By now you were producing prototypes like a man on a mission, and with the tangible evidence of what we were achieving, Joe agreed to the new proposal.
David: SO many prototypes, yes. How my printer didn’t explode I will never know. I was desperate to get the maximum-sized model into the smallest space, so there was a lot of jiggery pokery.
That in the end we fitted so many scene changes alongside puppets and props onto just ten sheets still amazes me, because the toy theatre alone took four. More than anything else I wanted to include the scene of the disembodied candelabra-bearing arms in the entrance to the castle, and I was at the point of offering to personally underwrite any added expense for them when you came back with the news that Joe had agreed to the extra sheets. We were up and away.
Clive: It was quite a roller-coaster we were all on. This was new territory in nearly every respect. The project was complex and we were all aware of how it needed to fit with the main book, while also being separate and stand-alone. Already it was apparent there needed to be considerable adaptation from what I was creating for the book, to what would work for a toy theatre.
Always there’s the line to be walked between being prudent with the budget, yet open to where a bit of extra funding will give real added value. Joe kept everything under close scrutiny as we progressed, and his was the suggestion to present the ten sheets in a folder with pockets, instead of being bound into a book. The script and instructions could then be produced as a small pamphlet, which in the end worked beautifully and saved costs.
David: I was amazed at how quickly everything progressed. It was only later I realised what a frenzy you were in trying to keep up with me, all while I was feeling the need to go faster to keep up with you! But we steadied our nerves and in the end the toy theatre was made at an incredible lick, and it looked wonderful.
In the next post we move on to Beowulf and how David took on the role of Animation Producer for the two Folio Society films he was asked to create to promote the new book.
In 1964 Hammer Films released its Terence Fisher-directed horror, The Gorgon. It was an elegant and unexpected addition to the Hammer canon, taking as its titular ‘monster’ a creature borrowed from Greek mythology.
The studio was rather good at creating female ‘monsters’, The Reptile in 1966 being a significant success, as was The Countess Dracula in 1971.
Working out of Bray Studios, what Hammer Films lacked in budget, they more than made up for in lushly gothic design and brooding atmosphere. Their teams of writers, directors, set and costume designers, make-up artists, matte and model artists and composers, created a rich seam of cinematic horror. They re-invented the old monsters of the Universal Studios – Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Mummy among them – in ways that found completely new audiences. The films were largely strongly European in their settings, with brooding Carpathian castles looming over villages where peasants lived in dread of their vampiric overlords.
‘Castle Borski’, a combination matte-painting and model for The Gorgon. The skill of the Hammer matte artists created wonderfully painterly settings for the sinister goings-on.
The cast was stellar: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Richard Pascoe, with Barbara Shelley in the role of Carla Hoffman. Shelley was the studio’s top female star. With her rich auburn hair, evenly chiselled features and low voice, she brought gravity as well as beauty to all her roles. In Carla she played a distaff to that horror staple – the werewolf – by being transformed at full moon into Megeara the Gorgon, whose dreadful stare turns human flesh to stone, the premise for which is the ‘serial killer’ heart of the story.
Fisher and his team were concerned that transforming Shelley into the Gorgon was going to create multiple difficulties. The story required the creature’s true identity be revealed only toward the end of the film, but given there were to be several close-ups of the monster’s ‘killer stare’, it was believed the deceit would be hard to pull off were Shelley to be under the make-up. There was also the matter of time. Transforming Shelley’s classic looks into Megeara would hold up filming on a regular basis, so despite the fact that she was very keen to play the character in both manifestations, no matter the discomforts involved, it was decided to use another actress who might plausibly represent a grotesque version of her, up to the point when the duality is revealed.
Enter Prudence Hyam, an actor and retired ballet dancer who Fisher and his team believed would have the necessary performance skills to embody the elegant, poisonous intensity they hoped to achieve in the Gorgon, yet be up to the rigours of of the uncomfortable physical demands. Hyam didn’t disappoint. She cheerfully submitted to the heavy headpiece hiding the snake mechanisms under her wig, which was over seven pounds in weight. She wore bloodshot, full-sclera contact lenses that in these early days of the technology were not at all comfortable.
This short clip shows Prudence in full make-up and towelling dressing-gown, marching out of the Bray Studios make-up department having hitched the cumbersome loops of snake-mechanism cable-controls over her shoulder, while make-up man Roy Ashton follows with the box that will operate everything out of shot. Hyam looks like a woman not to be put off by seven pounds of special-effects attached to her head!
Prudence in the make-up chair while the hairdresser attends to her snaky locks.
Hyam clearly didn’t have any problem with playing a character deemed to be ‘monstrous’. One gets the sense she was a performer to her core, relishing the challenges and an opportunity to be evil.
Make-up designer Roy Ashton working with life-casts of Prudence Hyam and Barbara Shelley.
When the Gorgon makes her first appearance in Castle Borski, it’s a moment of spine-chilling unease. Cobwebs billow as she emerges from behind them, a simple effect that adds to the sense of predatory malevolence. Hyam was on a small wheeled platform that created a gliding trajectory – rather like the one employed under Josette Day in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Béte – and her dancer’s posture wedded to an icy intensity of expression, makes the moment unforgettable.
The set is one which fans of Hammer will know from several films, instantly recognisable by the colonnaded gallery encircling the entrance hallway and the stairway that’s so effective in terms of staging low-angle dramatic moments. Here the space is tellingly furnished with the life-sized hulk of a headless and decaying classical statue, a queasy clue as to what haunts its shadowy recesses.
The Gorgon is not a film without flaws. But having seen it, despite its X-certificate, when I was just thirteen – the local flea-pit cinema never having ever turned down a ticket-purchase on the grounds of age – the memory of it has stayed with me for a lifetime. The appearance of the Gorgon herself has attracted occasionally – in my opinion – unfair comment from critics, with jibes about the character’s design deficiencies. But the jerky rubber snakes and the the too-obvious scaly skin appliances notwithstanding, her appearance gives the film moments of genuine horror, and Hyam’s fierce intensity as she glides out to literally petrify her victims, has persisted in my dreams for five and a half decades. So many times the mood of that colonnaded gallery with its monstress glimmering as green-as-absinthe in the cobwebby shadows has nudged into my work, whether in Neo-Romantic paintings of mood-drenched ruins, or in the creepy filmed sequences of interiors I made for the stage production of Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes.
Soon there is to be a little tribute to the Gorgon, in all her basilisk-eyed venomousness, in a little project I currently have on the go. Watch this space.
Those who deserve credit:
Director: Terence Fisher
Music: James Bernard
Cinematography: Michael Reed
Editor: Eric Boyd Perkins
Production Design: Bernard Robinson
Art Direction: Don Mingaye
Make-up: Roy Ashton
And lastly, Prudence herself, who so memorably added to the canon of movie grotesques, and deserves to be better credited and celebrated.
In 2016 Random Spectacular published a picture-book of my dark re-working of the fairy tale Hansel & Gretel. There was no text, save what I hand-lettered into the illustrations.
The following year Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop in Covent Garden commissioned a toy theatre kit from me, based on the book.
In response to the two publications, Goldfield Productions engaged me to direct and design a stage production. Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes with music by Matthew Kaner and a libretto by Simon Armitage, was created for a chamber consort, a narrator/singer and two puppeteers, and it premiered at the 2018 Cheltenham Music Festival followed by a five month tour.
Simon Armitage meets Gretel for the first time at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
A matinee at the Barbican was recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio 3 Christmas week 2018.
The following year Design for Today published a hardback edition of Simon Armitage’s libretto that I illustrated, and in 2020 it won me the V&A Illustrated Book Award.
Bombs destroy the children’s formally idyllic world.
In 2023 there’s to be a major exhibition of my work on the theme of Hansel & Gretel at Oriel Myrddin in Carmarthen. The exhibition is to include original artworks made for the several publications, my project books, maquettes and preparatory works.
Auditions for puppeteers at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
Lay-out for an illustration from my project book.
There will be many items from the stage production, including shadow puppets created by Peter Lloyd, set models built by Phil Cooper, vintage toys that I loaned to the production and a huge doll’s house, the inside of which I decorated and filmed to represent the interior of the Witch’s lair.
Peter Lloyd’s shadow puppet for the Witch being animated by me. Photograph by permission of Phil Cooper, who was my wonderful design assistant on the production.
Designer Phillip Cooper animating Lebkuchen he’d made for the production.
One of several animations from the production used to illustrate Hansel and Gretel’s imaginative worlds of play.
My little Russian clockwork singing bird (she was made in St Petersburg) appeared in the stage production, and then in the book published by Design for Today.
Permission for a loan to the gallery of the puppets of Hansel and Gretel designed by me for the production, has been turned down by Goldfield’s Artistic Director, Kate Romano. She gave dislike of me as her reason. Given that the costs of designing and making the puppets had been paid for out of an Arts Council grant, and given the budget was so tight that I personally paid a costume designer to create a wardrobe for them, her decision seems at best ill-judged. As the director of a charitable trust which has been extensively funded from philanthropic organisations, anyone might expect better from her than this. The exhibition will be especially appealing to children, and for a registered charity to deny a ‘museums accredited’ gallery the opportunity to inspire young minds with such beautiful examples of the art of puppet-making, is not merely perplexing, but frankly shameful.
I approached the Chair of the Goldfield Trust, Caroline Clegg, hoping that she might persuade Kate to change her mind and save the company from public scrutiny into a matter that looks very bad for both of them. It would be hard to tell from Caroline’s e-mail that she and I know each other, having both worked on the production for months when she was appointed by Kate as dramaturg to it. Weirdly, both her e-mails to me make it sound as though we’ve never met before. This has added another layer of the surreal to what has frequently felt decidedly strange when dealing with Kate Romano and Caroline Clegg. Here’s Caroline’s second e-mail to me:
Dear Mr Hicks-Jenkins,
In response to your recent request the Trustees of Goldfield Productions support Ms Romano’s decision not to loan the Hansel and Gretel puppets.
Kind regards
Ms Caroline Clegg
as Chair of Goldfield Productions
Why am I writing about all this now, so long after the event? Certainly not to persuade Kate Romano to change her mind about loaning the puppets. Over four years I’ve several times held out a hand of reconciliation in the hope of encouraging her to set aside resentments so we may together protect the legacy of what we made. I was and remain proud of my work on the stage production of Hansel & Gretel, and want to be able to share what was achieved in the exhibition. However everything I’ve written to Kate has gone unacknowledged and unanswered. There’s been not one e-mail reply to any of my attempts to lower the temperature of her antagonism. She is down a bunker in this matter, refusing to engage, and such behaviour in the world the way it is right now, is not a good look for anyone, let alone an arts administrator. Today I’m writing this because many are beginning to ask whether the puppets are going to be in the exhibition. Luckily because we have an ample record of the puppets in drawings, photographs and videos, they will be seen, though not be present.
It would be easier in many ways just to make a simple excuse for their absences which skates around what’s happened, but I see no reason to do that when Kate Romano and Caroline Clegg should clearly be the ones to explain why they’ve made the decision to hide the puppets from public view.
Puppeteers Di Ford and Lizzie Wort, who brilliantly brought Hansel and Gretel to life.
Simon’s reinvention of the fairy tale, is eerily prescient of what we’re seeing now in Ukraine. The puppets would have meant a great deal to many visitors had Kate Romano found it in her heart to lend them to the gallery, but she did not. The puppets were conceptualised and designed by me, their making supervised by me, in part funded by me and their performances on stage, shaped by me together with puppeteers Di and Lizzie. Kate’s reason for refusing the gallery loan appears to be all about personal enmity, which is troubling in a CEO in the performing arts. Anyone who feels that she made a decision that requires explanation, might take it up with her.
Kate Romano, CEO and Artistic Director of Goldfield Productions (Registered charity: 1173427) and CEO of Stapleford Granary Arts Centre.
With Olivia’s play script for the toy theatre delivered, it was time to consider who might write the music to accompany her lyrics for Beauty’s song ‘Time for a Change of Heart’, performed at the end of the play. Olivia approached her friend, musician Paul Sartin of the group Bellowhead, and to everyone’s delight, he agree to join the team.
Once his music was ready, it was time for graphic designer Laurence Beck to lay out Olivia’s play script, Paul’s arrangement for her lyrics, David’s instructions for constructing the model and my brief histories of toy theatre and the origins of Beauty and the Beast, into the booklet to accompany the model. The 10 construction-cards to cut out and make the toy theatre, scenery and characters of the production, together with the 24 page booklet, were designed to fit into a 23 x 25 cms folder where the scenery, puppets and script could be stored for safe keeping once the theatre was made. All that remained was for the many elements of the toy theatre to be printed and packed ready for sale.
The toy theatre constructed
To promote what was about to be published, with Joe’s agreement David and I set about producing an animation video for the Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre, to be shown at YouTube and on various social media platforms. The plan was to offer a condensed visual account of Olivia’s scenario set to music, and as he’d already played such a significant part in creating the toy theatre, David was perfectly placed for making the animated version of it. With the animation prepared, everything was set for launch. We would have our beautiful toy theatre out in good time for the Christmas market.
Still we weren’t through. David and I had been wondering how we might further promote the toy theatre, and what alternatives might be open to us if we weren’t able to have a pre-Christmas live event to which an audience could be invited.
A broadcast film of a performance might be the solution, but even that could be difficult to organise given the current circumstances. So we began to plan a film in which all the contributing creators could work at a distance from each other. The first and most urgent requirement was to find an actor to read Olivia’s play script, and moreover one who would seize the multiple opportunities afforded by it. Here were poetry, humour, menace and crackling atmosphere, and we needed an actor skilled on multiple levels to give a nuanced and mesmerising performance. Luckily I knew who would deliver all that for us in bucketloads, and Jennifer Castle became the final creative talent to join the Beauty & Beast team, alongside Ross Boyask, who undertook to both record the audio tracks of Jennifer’s performance and take the many portrait shots of her that we needed in order to incorporate her into the film.
Jennifer Castle and Beauty and Beast
The work is underway and further announcements will be forthcoming before too long. Here’s a toy theatre that is not just a desirable object, but one that comes with all the online creative encouragement and inspiration that anyone could wish for. I’m enormously proud of the team that made it. My thanks to:
Joe Pearson at Design for Today
Olivia McCannon
Paul Sartin
David W. Slack
Laurence Beck
Jennifer Castle
Ross Boyask
The Design for Today Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre is available
It all began earlier this year with the Hansel & Gretel Toy Theatre I’d designed in 2017 for Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop. David W. Slack and I didn’t know each other, but exchanged a flurry of messages at Instagram about how he was planning to adapt his newly acquired Hansel & Gretel model to include a curved stage-front. Before we knew it we were in regular contact, fuelled by the fact we’re both painters and by our shared passion for Toy Theatre. I was working flat out on the illustrations for my next book with publisher Design for Today, Beauty & Beast, in collaboration with writer Olivia McCanon, and David and I talked about the evolving images for it. In photographs, his finished model of the Pollock’s theatre I’d designed was sharp and meticulous. The man really knew how to cut and construct a toy theatre.
I had a notion to make a very simple toy theatre as a promotion for Beauty & Beast. It would have to be simple because I had no spare time to work on it. Before I tried the idea out on my publisher, Joe, I confided in David about it, casually wondering whether if he had the time he might consider helping me out. As it was going to be a modest project and would hopefully not take up too much of his time, it could be fun. Beyond the sense of ease that made online conversations between us so relaxed, I had the strongest feeling that we needed to collaborate. It was almost an imperative. Luckily he felt the same way and enthusiastically leapt in.
Puppets for a toy theatre
The division of labour evolved with complete ease. I made roughs while David worked confidently to produce the optimum design for the model. Ideas flowed smoothly. We were so attuned that we developed a pattern allowing each of us creative freedom. Once the proscenium arch design had been settled on, David produced prototype toy stages at extraordinary speed, each version improving on the last. By this time he was leading with the design work, briefing me on what I needed to be making. He was drafting scenery, too, often using my completed illustrations made for the book as initial sources. I was having to fit all this between my daily schedule of illustrations for the main book, though things became simpler when David began sending me templates so all I had to do was fill in the shapes with drawing, knowing the ‘fit’ had already been worked out.
David’s prototype toy stages
David’s enthusiasm for the project meant that he was forever coming up with ideas to ‘improve’ outcomes, which meant the dawning realisation for both of us that it was a rather more complete production than we’d anticipated at the outset. Olivia McCannon was enlisted to write the script, a task she undertook with good grace even though it greatly added to her already overburdened work-load. It wasn’t to be a straight adaptation of her beautiful text for the book, but a clever reinvention of a nineteenth century toy theatre pantomime, ingenious and slightly mad. I broke the news to Joe Pearson with some trepidation that we’d gained more construction pages than originally estimated, and that moreover several of them required printing on both sides, which would require meticulous alignment by the printer. Joe took it all in his stride and began costing.
The script was still being written and so we had no idea how many pages it might fill. We began considering the matter of the binding for the toy theatre book, so as for it to be simple to take apart. I’m pretty certain it was David who first suggested we consider not binding, but offering loose construction sheets in a folder, and Joe who came up with the idea of something like an old-fashioned double-LP cover, with half-wallets inside. These were exciting developments because they meant the toy theatre would be unique in its presentation. Joe felt a separate ‘chapbook’ for the script and instructions would be the way forward, slipped into one of the pockets of the folder. The idea of a script in miniature for toy theatre performances was lovely, and mirrored the toy theatre scripts of the nineteenth century. Everyone was in a frenzy of invention and creativity.
Today I take pleasure in announcing that Jennifer Castle has joined the Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre team, and that we are working together to create a filmed performance of Olivia McCannon’s wonderful play-script with Jennifer giving life to all the roles, accompanied by the toy theatre in action. In a curtain-raiser to all that excitement, Jennifer and I have been in conversation.
Clive: Jennifer, for the past nine months the artwork, model construction, script and graphic design for the Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre have been gently evolving into the product we have today. You’ve come to the project only recently, but from our conversations I’m getting the distinct impression you’ve hit the ground running, and that in part must be to do with the script by Olivia McCannon. What were your feelings when you read it?
Jennifer: Right from the beginning, I suspected that Olivia McCannon and I might be close together in age. So many of what at first glance might seem to be ‘throwaway’ lines resonate deeply with me. For example, Beauty herself, so often portrayed as the noble ingenue, in Olivia’s hands becomes a somewhat exasperated, fully formed young woman cognisant of the ridiculousness of her situation. Her brusque ‘we know why I’m here, let’s not waste time getting up to speed’ attitude, combined with the innocence, intricacy and beauty of the poetry itself delighted me. Yet Beauty remains recognisably the same character we have all come across as children for 300 years. Thanks to Olivia’s writing, I feel free to explore the character of Beauty, all of her anger as well as her inherent goodness, without worrying that she will be unrecognisable to anyone. From a technical point of view, in terms of the actual playscript; it is subtle and wicked, the work of a poet at the very top of her game, and I feel a keen sense of responsibility to do the rhythm of the work justice.
Clive: My friend Simon Callow, who has a fair number of one-man shows under his belt, once told me that the thing he missed most when performing alone, was the camaraderie of the team and the liveliness of a rehearsal room filled with people and ideas. How do you feel about the fact that you’ll be performing all of the roles in this short play?
Jennifer: I will be performing all the roles in the play. So I will play! As a child, I didn’t have any problems holding a doll in each hand and improvising full blown dramatic confrontations that would put a soap opera to shame. It’s been a while, I grant you, but if a toy theatre can’t help me back into the unselfconscious headspace of a child with a couple of Barbies, I think I may be in the wrong profession! Joking aside, I am happy to say that I don’t consider this to be a ‘one-woman show’ at all. I’ll have the beautiful characters written by Olivia, drawn by you, and brought to stunning animated life by David W. Slack right alongside me. When we first spoke on the telephone about this project, you told me that in a previous collaboration with Simon Armitage of Hansel & Gretel, what had impressed you most in a live reading of the piece by him was that he didn’t attempt to ‘do’ voices for each role, but simply read the lines in his own voice and let the characters speak for themselves. I found that really interesting.
Clive: The pandemic has changed the conditions of work for all of us. But because I live in a far- flung corner of west Wales, long before social distancing catapulted just about everyone into working through the mediums of email, messaging and ‘Zoom’, I’d been forging collaborative relationships via social media. My close collaboration with Dan Bugg of the Penfold Press has for the past five years been carried out almost entirely through Facebook and Insta messaging, and although David W. Slack and I have been in extensive daily contact as he designed the Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre model, we’ve never met. (A fact I find hard to believe because we feel very close.) The entertainment industry has been hard hit by Covid, and particularly live theatre which effectively closed down completely. How have things been for you as an actor? Have unexpected ways of working – and unexpected projects – emerged out of all this strangeness?
Jennifer: Can I tell you something? As an actor, the most unexpected thing for me was how I came to view NOT working. When we think of actors, we naturally think of household names. But only 2% of professional actors make a living from the profession and 90% are out of work at any one time! So when the pandemic hit, I suddenly didn’t have to go through the exhausting ritual actors face every time we meet casual acquaintances or family: answering the question “So what are you acting in now?” with a self deprecating shrug and a “well….” It was such a relief. Of course I got fed up of sitting on the balcony reading comics within about 2 weeks, so I and my fellow actor friends soon found each other online and began planning for the moment lockdown ended! I wrote my first script, participated in Zoom script readings for friends and rediscovered a desire to get out there and just DO something that had been waning in the couple of years prior to 2020. Though restrictions are now easing, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that the future of film and tv castings is going to be ‘self-taped’ auditions, which may sound convenient but instead of getting to meet and connect with a casting director, getting a feel for the room and trying a scene out a few times with feedback, I now have to film myself in a bathroom and hope for the best, which can sometimes be a frustrating experience! But on the whole? I was so happy when productions were allowed to start up again. Remote work can be valuable and productive, but as an actor, NOTHING beats human contact when it comes to creating. What about you? As an artist, do you think that you would still live in ‘far-flung West Wales’ if you didn’t have the internet or would you need to live closer to an artistic hub?
Clive: Moving to Ty Isaf fifteen years ago coincided with the burgeoning of the Internet and the appearance of social media. Facebook was just taking off. Almost from the first week here our connections with the outside world began to grow. Of course the world managed to function perfectly well pre-Internet, but my re-location to a far-flung corner of Wales has been founded from the start on good, strong connections with my collaborators through social media messaging services, e-mails and much later, Zoom. How would I manage without these connections? I suspect not at all well. I love peace and quiet and even isolation in bite-size chunks. But I am collaborative by nature and I’m social by habit, so I need a balance. Before Covid Ty Isaf had been a bit of a creative hub, with my collaborators frequently spending time here so as to be able to work in close contact. We’ve held early brain-storming production meetings on performative works here, and I have a pretty good pop-up animation studio that I can fit into the dining-room when occasion demands.
Although you and I met just the once, several years ago in Cardiff at the home of a mutual friend, you’ve come to this project via a post you made at Facebook (social media, again) that caught my eye and got me thinking.
Jennifer: You have generously omitted the fact that my bad day was caused by my absolutely bombing in an audition that morning! I took to Facebook to admit as such and received a surprisingly sympathetic response. We actors rarely admit our failures because like sharks, theatre folk can smell blood in the water.
Clive: It must have been a slightly strange experience having someone coming at you out of the blue with a hard-to-describe and evolving project after you’d admitted on social media to having had a bad day.
Jennifer: If you were reading a novel, and the protagonist, dejected after yet another failed audition, received a message from a famous artist telling her that he’d like to offer her a chance at a challenging project because her honesty impressed him and she replied “Eh….nah”, how far across the room do you think you would throw the book?
Clive: I take your point. Nevertheless, you took a leap of faith and engaged with me where many would have balked, and I appreciate that.
Jennifer: Gosh that’s interesting that you would say that. Who would balk? Should I have balked? In all seriousness, you not only took a chance on me, you’ve shown nothing but faith in me from the start of this journey. I’m not taking that for granted.
Clive: Are you generally a cautious or adventurous person?
Jennifer: Yes, sometimes cautious and sometimes adventurous.
Clive: David W. Slack and I have a passion for the work of David Firmin and Oliver Postgate, who were the creators at Smallfilms of Clangers, Noggin the Nog and Bagpuss. When I described to you that Bagpuss was an inspiration for the low-tech way in which we hoped to make the film, you yelled with delight and enthusiasm. Did that cinch the deal for you?
Jennifer: I was already enthusiastic at the thought of a toy theatre, but the old stop motion beauty of Bagpuss is timeless and perfect and wonderful. It’s so very British – comforting and sometimes uncomfortable at the same time. I can’t wait to see what we come up with together. I’m excited and nervous, comfortable and pushed beyond my comfort zone – I’m ready to be Bagpussed!
…
Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Jennifer Castle were in conversation. The top image is by David W. Slack, with special thanks to Ross Boyask for Jennifer Mullen’s portrait shot.
The Design for Today Beauty & Beast Toy Theatre is available:
Artwork by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Model Design by David W. Slack, Script by Olivia McCannon and Music for the play by Paul Sartin. Graphic Design for the Playbook by Laurence Beck.
This post was written by my friend and collaborator Gloria, who under the umbrella of her business Sussex Lustreware, has produced the Harlequinade range of lustre-embellished transferware for which I made drawings on the theme of Victorian Toy Theatre.
A post on the subject of theatrical swags – and collaborative sparks!
“With our first collection, the World of Wonders, Clive gave me his beautiful drawings and more or less carte blanche on the production and decoration of the pots, largely leaving me to get on with it as I thought best, a touching display of trust!
With Harlequinade he was creating the artwork especially for them, and greater collaboration on the overall design seemed in order to make the most of it. So over the summer we had some lengthy chats via Instagram, with pictures and ideas flying back and forth between us. And emojis of course! 😀😆👍
As an admirer of Laura Knight’s ‘Circus’ designs for Clarice Cliff in the 1930s I was keen at the chance to use plate rims in a similar way, with an audience and ruched swags suggestive of a night at the theatre.
Laura Knight Circus plate
Laura Knight Circus plate with the audience around the rim
Clive obliged with small groups of spectators, while I tried to work out how best to suggest draped velvet with lines of lustre.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins Post-It with suggestion for swag placement
Above and below: Harlequinade audience
Other influences and inspiration cropped up in conversation, from Hockney’s ‘Rake’s Progress’ Glyndebourne sets, through Rex Whistler interiors, to the trompe l’oeil Austrian curtain wallpaper in my aunt’s C20 Bethnal Green bathroom 🤩.
Rex Whistler ‘swag’
Hockney design for The Rake’s Progress
We decided that a single ellipse was too abstract, that three were too much, and so arrived at two. Plus the trio of embellishments, so that the glamour of the occasion – and our fluency as semioticians – should be in no doubt!
From a 19th Century Toy Theatre Character Sheet
Reinterpretation + swags
I was so pleased with the results that the swags ended up not just on the plates but festoon the jugs and trinket box too ✨💖
Lustre swags before firing
Trinket-box with with swags
It was really fun working in this way, so I thought you might like to see a few snippets ‘behind the scenes’!”
Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog: 