Judy Watson, Michael Craven & Benjamin Rowling, Penny Benson, Jennifer VonStein, Charlotte Hills and Liisa Mannery
…
Judy Watson: Weasily Wolves

…
While pressure of work has meant that illustrator Judy Watson hasn’t yet completed her puppets… the design for which may be seen above… enough has been achieved for us to profit from what she’s produced so far. I’ve never yet seen puppets constructed from crumpled brown paper, but that’s what Judy is doing here. While fragility is bound to be an issue, so characterful are the figures she’s building in this extraordinary material that I think any risks are as nothing in the face of the sheer force of her creations. With these puppets very little ‘process’ gets in the way of the incredibly fresh visualisation. The drawings are transformed into 3D renderings in no time at all. No laborious wood-carving, modelling and casting or papier mâché, but an immediate conjuring of the beasts, as fresh as new paint.
Here’s the raw material, crumpled and roughly painted. It has a fantastic texture.

…

Above and below: sharp snouts and delicately pointy claws masterfully conjured out of rumpled paper.

…

…

…

Two wolves acting as one… the brains and the brawn… and I love their delightful silliness. Look at them hatching their plot in the fantastic drawing above, and that lolling, pink-as-raspberry-juice tongue, and grandma’s lacy night-cap behind the jauntily pricked wolf-ears. It’s all so sharply observed and astringent. This idiot thinks he’s really going to fool Red-Riding-Hood, and the idea is as charming as the wolf’s impersonation is futile! I cannot wait to see these puppets finished
…
Michael Craven & Benjamin Rowling: Firle the Giant

Michael Craven and Benjamin Rowling, the design team behind TheBigForest write:
“This is the first puppet we have made and the first time we have used papier mache. We learnt a lot and have enjoyed the process. We are going to experiment further with both puppet forms and using papier mache so the Puppet Challenge has been a really enjoyable experience for us.”
“The puppet is constructed with a papier mache head, safety eyes, a wooden pole that enables the head to move and card hands with wooden poles. He works well as a puppet although we would now construct his body in a different way having learnt about puppet making during the project.”

“We imagined our puppet in the final scene of his story – with a broken and heavy heart looking back at the landscape and his dead giant friend just before he begins walking.”

“We have used maps in our art practice for some time but have never thought of using them in our work at TheBigForest which tends to be more playful. We experimented with older maps of the Wilmington and Firle area but in the end settled for a pre Second World War map (around 1932) that we photocopied on to flip chart paper which is the right consistency for papier mache work and we liked the image in black and white rather than colour. The lines of the contours, tumuli and barrows make up the front of the giants face so he is truly rooted in the local landscape. The back of his head is pasted with map fragments of ‘modern’ Firle area – the railway lines and roads of the 1930’s map and on the hands the map is blurred as we had moved the map away from the copier.”
…
Penny Benson: Goblin Market

…
Penny Benson asked to join the Puppet Challenge when she was already well into a project designing a puppet production of the Christina Rossetti narrative poem Goblin Market. Peter Slight and I were happy to welcome her on board, as the work was looking so promising.

…

The production photographs show that she took the opportunities afforded to make an ambitious, imaginative statement with her puppets, which are pleasingly angular and expressive.
…

…

…
Penny writes:
“I designed and built 7 goblin puppets for the show which was produced at Connecticut Repertory Theater, USA. The design/build process took approximately 2 months. The figures are all table-top style, operated by rods by puppeteers in full view of the audience.”

“A few of them have specialised movement: the head of the Parrot-like goblin extends on a long neck, Rat’s belly pops forward and his legs have a walking mechanism. The limbs and bodies were all made of wood, the bodies fleshed out in foam covered with lycra. The hands were done with wooden dowels and putty/thermoplastic for the knuckles. Each head was sculpted in a water based clay from which a plaster mold was taken.”

…

…

The final heads were slip cast in firm neoprene rubber. Metal rods were placed horizontally through an eye bolt in the neck, and attached horizontally through the interior of the heads using epoxy and thermoplastic. The heads were painted with acrylics and sequins were added to the eyes to reflect light. The costumes were designed by Xia Chen Zhou.”
…

…
Jennifer Von Stein: Rossetti Revisited

…
Jennifer VonStein also chose Christina Rossetti’s poem of Goblin Market for her Puppet Challenge subject. She writes:
“Memory informs my work. Memories are real, but different from the reality they remember. Thoughts and images of my childhood fears and fancies, along with the current daily terrors of being a mother of children under four years of age, are a part of these pieces.
So instead of the heroines of Goblin Market, Laura and Lizzie, I created the Goblin Men. Are they innocent like children? I think not, although they have a certain innocence to them, like the poem.
I began by sketching instead of taking notes during work meetings, a sure sign that my subconscious is at work.”
…

…
“There would defiantly need to be a one-eyed puppet. I recently read The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaimen and loved his description of the creature Ursula, all cloth and wind, something very, very other.”
…

…
“I wanted to capture this sense of otherness in my puppets, and was enchanted when I saw the puppets of Paul Klee. His simple glove puppets had the look I wanted, and for a first time puppet maker, appeared simple enough to make.”
…

…

…

…
Charlotte Hills: The Dandy Fox

…
After a false start with an idea that Charlotte eventually realised needed more time to ‘cook’, she set about creating a marionette character by ‘needle-felting’. This is another first for me, as I’ve never before seen a marionette made in this material.
…
He started life as this drawing.

…
Needle-felting is a long process, and it was quite a while before the head of the puppet emerged. I love the expression Charlotte worked into him. He has such soulful eyes.

…
Finally he was ready to dress, and Charlotte stitched the most perfect garment for her dandy little fellow. I’d happily wear this coat myself… if it were a tad bigger!

…
I think there were times when Charlotte despaired of ever finishing her marionette. She pushed herself and her skills to the limit at every stage, and it’s a testament to her determination and vision that she produced this extraordinarily elegant and charming puppet.
Charlotte writes of her Mr Fox:
“The theme of the trickster runs very deeply through the mythology of most human societies. From Loki, to Brer Rabbit; from the Native American coyote spirit to the Monkey King in China. We need the trickster animus to express the outcast.
Through the folklore of Europe run the stories of Reynard the fox, Isengrim the wolf, Tybalt the cat, Chanticleer the cockerel and Bruin the bear. Fast talking and clever, tricky and dishonest, Reynard is a reflection of our clever and unscrupulous selves. We need him to find an easy way, to take the blame, to show up our own vanities.”
…
Liisa Mannery: Shadowlands

…
Liisa is articulate, funny and scrupulously honest in her description of how she approached her Puppet Challenge. I love the way she writes about her experiments at her blog (linked below) and so I shall leave her to explain them in her own words:
“Some things I know about puppets that I didn’t know 3 months ago:
1. Shadow puppets need to move, a lot. Even if they are intricately detailed, or colorful, they are basically very subtle creatures and need to overact to make their presence felt.
2. I dislike being removed from the action — I want to see it from the front or the top, or the side. But from the back…unh. And what I’m seeing isn’t even what the audience is seeing, only the thing that is creating the shadow that the audience is seeing. I love shadow puppetry, but I’ll sit in the audience from now on, thank you..
3. But…remove the screen that separates the front and back of the stage, leaving paper figures on sticks or strings…that’s exciting. True, I think anything made of paper is exciting. And, personally, I believe you can make just about anything out of paper. Preferably newspaper.
4. Also exciting is to take the shadow puppets off their sticks, and use them for animation, a la Lotte Reiniger. But maybe that isn’t, strictly speaking, puppetry. If that’s true then I’m in trouble. (Editor’s note: nothing to worry about there, Liisa. It is puppetry.)
Some things I do know, but need to be reminded of:
1. Fancy mechanics are fun to design and build, but they aren’t usually necessary and utilizing them will probably just make your hands hurt.
2. Simplify, simplify, simplify. I like Done to Death, but I don’t do it very well.”
…
“I chose to make shadow-puppets; my character of choice was Väinämöinen, the aged sage and rune singer from the Finnish epic poem The Kalevala, but the project quickly branched out into other characters from the stories.
Photo 1 (above) is Joukahainen, who had the temerity to challenge Väinämöinen to a dual of magic and got himself sung into a patch of quicksand.
Photo 2 (below) is Lemminkainen, who met a messy end and whose mother fished all the pieces of him out of the River Tuoni and (with a little divine help) patched him up. Not that either of them learned his lesson.”
…

…
“In the interests of full disclosure I’ll say that the figures in the pictures were made as shadow puppets, but as such were marginally successful and impossible to photograph! So, the photos are the puppets, sans sticks, laid on a light table.
They are made of watercolor paper with joints of sewing snaps. I made no particular effort to hide or disguise the structure, it seemed to add something.
This was a really engaging project for me. (And not over yet!) ”
…

“Above: an early Väinämöinen with several experimental joints. There’s a small brad on his face, bits of pipe cleaner on his ankles and wrists, and “butterflies” for lack of a better word everywhere else. These butterflies were cut from cardboard (knees) and aluminum bakeware (everywhere else) and were the only part of the project that drew blood! (I’ll post an explanation of how these are made and work. It’s intriguing.)”
…

…

…
“Above: Lemminkainen’s mother and another Väinämöinen, have sewing snaps for joints. They work beautifully, can be unsnapped and reused repeatedly and, with a little planning, can even be made to look like jewelry or hardware. Not that that would show up very well in a shadow. And I have a million of them already…how about that! Mother’s snaps are clear plastic; I thought that would be perfect but actually they have a small hole straight through them and so mother appeared to be held together by spots of light. So…constellation shadow puppets, maybe? But not in this story.”
…

…
“Above: In the upper left of the picture is the totally overworked but rather fun Väinämöinen that moves his arms and opens his mouth to sing. It only takes four hands to work him, all the while hollering to the audience “Wait a sec, I’ve almost got it!” Hated to give up on that, but sometimes you really must “kill your darlings.”
…
Liisa’s shadow-puppet explorations are clearly ‘in process’, and I for one can’t wait to see where she goes with all these ideas. I love her images, the variation in tone and density of shadow, with the overlappings evident, as well as the clever use of sewing-snaps. These are very close in feel to the Chinese, Turkish and Greek traditions of shadow-puppetry. I feel that whatever problems Liisa is experiencing with operating them on a vertical screen, could be solved quite easily with time and help. Alternatively, the puppets would work wonderfully manipulated in stop-motion on her light-box. I heartily recommend you explore her blog, where all these wonderful experiments in puppetry are going on.
…
This is the last official post of the Puppet Challenge. There may be a few add-ons yet to come, such as the extra puppets made by enthusiastic and prolific challengers, and there could even be the odd late arrival at the party. But for the main part, it’s over.
The challenge as laid out at the Artlog last year by curator Peter Slight, has been magnificently met by most of those who signed to it. A few made a good start but then weren’t able to complete for very good reasons, among them Val Littlewood, Bev Wigney, Zoe Blue, Matt and Amanda Caines and Christina Cairns, whose finished puppet I hope yet to see, as she had made such a promising start. Paul Bommer had to drop out due to pressure of work. Some simply signed but then never showed again, and that’s just the way of these things. But the majority pursued the project to the end, working tirelessly and with a great deal of creativity. Here is a list of the forty-one who took part and stayed the course, together with links to the posts their work appears in.”
Part 1
Jodi Le Bigre, Joe McLaren and Hussam El-Sherif
Part 2
Jill Desborough Chris Lettington and Rachel Larkins
Part 3
Nicky Arscott, Nomi McLeod and Ruth Barrett-Danes
Part 4
Stuart Kolakovic, Clive hicks-Jenkins and Steve & Pamela Harris
Part 5
Philippa Robbins and Karen Godfrey
Part 6
Liz King
Part 7
Graham Carter, Caroline McCatty and Scott Garrett
Part 8
Lynne Lamb, Anna Marchi and Graeme Galvin
Part 9
Shellie Byatt, Leonard Greco and Claire Crystal
Part 10
Phil Cooper, Stephanie Redfern, Chloe Redfern, Anna Clucas and Janet Kershaw
Part 11
Andrew Grundon, Rima Staines and Sarah Young
Part 12
Peter Slight (curator), Ben Javens and Lucy Kempton
Part 13
Judy Watson, Michael Craven & Benjamin Rowling, Penny Benson, Jennifer Von Stein, Charlotte Hills and Liisa Mannery
…
It’s been a very great pleasure to host the exhibition at the Artlog, and to write about so much beautiful work. It has however been enormously time-consuming. I won’t promise another open exhibition any time soon, as I have a massive backlog of my own work to catch up with, and a big exhibition to be prepared for 2015 at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre, which will include puppets! I hope that any of you who further your puppet-making endeavours will stay in contact and keep me up to speed with your adventures. But for now, thank you for all your hard work and enthusiasm.
Very Best
Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Like this:
Like Loading...