The Secret Lives of Puppets

This video is my latest stop motion- a companion piece to the physical object of my Puppets and Prosthetics final project. The assignment was “The Secret Lives of Puppets,” and my goal was to have the cloth move while still on the loom as a sort of past life to the eventual fate of the cloth- a single, solid piece of fabric. In a way, the centipede has two lives, one on the cloth as movement and growth of production, and one off the loom, an object.

The Centipede Puppet with Eyes

The centipede was woven using pick-up via doublecloth. Once he was woven, I untied sections of the warp off the back beam and cut the side fringe loose so that I was able to manipulate slight movement. Moving everything by myself and taking pictures made my options for movement limited (you can see my hand pulling the side fringe in the video), but I’m satisfied with the resut as an experiment in the limitations of cloth- the materiality, function, and performative options for cloth.

The Final Object

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Narrative: Memory Cloth and Projection

a really terrible picture of the projection room and set up

Last night was the final weaving crit for the semester, and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I guess I had been looking at the cloth for so long with frustration, that I just assumed everyone else would be as frustrated as I was, and that was not the case. It just reminded me of the importance of stepping back from your work, taking a break, and then coming back to it with new eyes. You can be surprised by what you see. Crit, for me, is becoming increasingly important as I’m working with these new ideas as it helps me to refocus and realize things about the piece that I was struggling to grasp, ideas which are discussed below.

Quiet Brain Storms, Woven Cloth and Projection, 2009

Here is an image of the double cloth pickup piece by itself (a little wrinkly, ignore), and the cloth with the projection over top. The projection consists of eight images that cycle through in a continuous loop with variation of color, light, and impact of texture as overlay:

a sampling of the images used in the projection

The purpose of this cloth stands as memory. Cloth, as an heirloom, is something that is passed down through families, and gathers memories through generations. Even a single cloth, posessed by a single person, collects a range of memories and has the ability to have memories, for lack of a better word, projected into its history. Through the projection, I am exploring the power of memory and dreams, the disctinction and blurring between the two, and how a single event can be remembered many different ways, even in one still moment.

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Projecting Woven Narrative

I haven’t been talking a lot about weaving lately, mostly because I’ve been sorta stuck. My latest weaving assignment is a doublecloth pick-up project which describes a specific date and place through the use of imagery and choice of color. Essentially, this project is perfect for me. It’s narrative by nature and has few limitations, which is precisely why I’m using this opportunity to experiment with video projection.

Lately I’ve been dissatisfied with just cloth, so I’ve been trying to figure out ways to make cloth a multimedia/ mixed media experience. While I hesitate to jump directly to technology to solve this issue, I think it’s a good place to start in these early stages of my search for the perfect, specific medium for my oddly specific way of thinking.

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The Rabbit Wanderers

These are some stills from my latest Puppets and Prosthetics project, a stop motion shadow puppet show based on Carl Sandburg’s story, The Dollar Watch and the Five Jack Rabbits. Thematically, it follows my interest in lyrical or poetic storytelling and folktales. While I am usually accustomed to creating my own narratives, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to pay tribute to one of my favorite storytellers and one of my favorite stories of all time.

For this piece, I created a total of seven individual puppets; five rabbits and the two human figures. Each puppet was hand-cut using scissors and an xacto knife and jointed at crucial parts with wire. The backgrounds were created with a simple layering of white printer paper (thrifty!) and the occasional lacy cloud or two. To get the shadow puppet effect, I set up a glass panel and lit it from underneath with your every day table lamp so I could have the puppets and scenery moving overtop. I believe I wound up with around 659 individual pictures before the editing process began. The final film can be seen (not in high quality, unforunately) following the link below.

The Rabbit Wanderers

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