In January 2012 I was very lucky to travel to Pinerolo in the Piedmont region of Italy to study marionette construction with master puppeteer and maker Stephen Mottram.
During this intense week of making, I met a wonderful group of artists, marionette players, and puppeteers from all over the world, and felt completely out of my depth!
I found the wood carving particularly challenging, this was a completely new skill for me to try, we were working with very sharp tools and I was constantly wary of cutting myself, this was because Stephen warned me that the blade of the knife was so sharp that if I accidentally cut myself the blade wood not stop until it had hit a bone, so this made me a little tentative! The more experienced people on the course (i.e everyone else!) were not quite so afraid, despite this there occassional drops of blood to be seen on the bodies of our lifeless puppets as people accidentally cut themselves.
After a week of working 12 hours a day, my marionette was complete. I had a huge amount of help from the incredibly skilled, accomplished and humble Stephen Mottram.
What I admire so much about Stephen Mottram's work is that he is both an incredibly skilled craftsman and also an extremely gifted animator of his marionettes, a very special and rare combination I think. His method of marionette making that he has developed is based on his studies of movement and his insistence on the absolute precision required in the shifting of weight which the brain then registers as a convincing and life-like movement. This course was purely about marionette construction and was entitled "Secrets of the Fundamental Marionette" he also teaches a course "The Logic of Movement" which addresses the manipulation of the marionette based on his studies of movement and marionette manipulation.
http://www.stephenmottram.com/teaching.html
My interest in puppetry perhaps is a little more sentimental or symbolic, and is due to the fact that I had a great Aunt who was a very inspiring woman both to my own Mother and her siblings and to me and my brothers. She was an accomplished artist making portraits, landscapes, pottery, masks, and puppets for which she also wrote plays and short stories. She was involved in early experiments in television and I think the puppets she made were intended for a children's tv programme but not sure if they were ever made. If she was still alive today she would understand me and my work. I have written about her donkey mask see the link below.
http://globalsheepwomanresearchlaboratory.blogspot.de/2011/10/beginnings.html
I'm also interested in the idea of 'animation in it's broadest sense'. As an artist I'm interested in animating spaces, and situations, opening up the possibility for something poetic to happen in the everyday, to create encounters, to change the feeling and quality of a particular situation, to open something up, perhaps to provoke also.
I'm also interested in the relationship between the mask and the puppet. I see the mask as a cousin to the puppet, they are both engaged in a form of animation; both possess the possibility to change the performer's way of moving, and relationship to the audience. In both cases, when it is done well, the animator is hidden and the attention is drawn to the mask or puppet - to a character, feeling, or archetype.
I returned to Pinerolo in the Summer of 2012, to help out at the festival and I also performed there, both on the street and on the 'stage'.
I met many interesting and talented performers from all over the world, I learned so much about this community of 'players' and watched many performances.
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