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