-
In May and June I granted myself a three week residency. Artist residencies can be excellent for rigour and focus, but they are often an impossibility for sole parents. Applying also involves a lot of paperwork, uncertainty and waiting, and contorting to fit the terms. So instead, I granted one to myself and stayed home!…
-
I’ve been thinking about the old Waste Heirarchy – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – for years, and how it needs more levels to reflect the need to push it upstream to where decisions are made. So here’s one I’ve developed for theatre. It’s a helix now, so the different layers can talk to each other. Please…
-
As part of Arts on Tour’s Green Touring Online series I co-presented a session on sustainable making practices. Here’s the gist. I’ve been developing techniques for working with salvaged and low-impact materials for the last 27 years, and my work for performance has toured nationally and internationally to theatres, schools, festivals, galleries and museums. There…
-
Making a show is a deeply iterative process. In the second creative development for Feathers, a room full of people thrashed out the potential and the limitations of the puppets we’ve built, and tested them against Dan Giovannoni’s boisterous script. A list of tweaks and changes emerged, some necessary for narrative or performer comfort, some…
-
We’re in the countdown to rehearsals for Terrapin’s next touring show, Feathers. In the role of puppet designer, mentor and lead maker, I’ve been working with Danny Miller and Mads Hillam for almost a year to build seven characters, all technically challenging in their own way. The emphasis, as always, has been on using materials…
-
Joan and Judy is a touring show for aged care centres, designed in response to the residents’ wishes. Initially we baulked at the idea of Punch and Judy, but the memory triggers are strong for those who remember it from their childhoods, on beaches and at fairs. So we hacked it. A travelling troupe rolls…
-
After a schools tour that played to almost 11,000 Tasmanian kids, Paper Escaper has hit the theatres of the island. It’s a wordless show, told in images and sound, and tells the tale of a pop-up book character who tears themselves out of a boring story. The Maker, a force for order who slowly loses…
-
It’s Saturday night above a pub in Thirroul NSW, and the band is playing Purple Rain. This little creature is bound for the Wollongong Art Gallery tomorrow and it needs some urgent attention, so I’m doing surgery with paper bags and school glue. It was made in 1997 for my first solo show, Pets and…
-
Our Puppet design and construction workshop wrapped up with some frantic safety pins and flying scraps of fur. There’s never enough time to finish a puppet just the way you’d like, but at least these makers have peered into the bewitching rabbit hole that is puppetry. On the last day everyone took turns to puppeteer…
-
Thinking in multiple planes can really melt your brain. It’s Day 4 of our Puppet Design and Construction intensive, and everyone’s working on their mechanisms. Mads (pictured) set herself the challenging brief of swivelling eyeballs and moving eyebrows for her rabbit, all operated with one hand. The process of moving from a 2D drawing into…
