Thinking Through Making

This week I have been working with Jodie on our collaboration project for the year. We bought a fabric and very fluffy toy marionette bird – Marion – which we have been looking at to get a basic understanding of marionette. Marion is nearly all fabric apart from her slightly weighted body and feet, and the fluffiness of the material gives a ‘realness’ to her; the fluff moves like feathers or fur would. Because of her flexible neck and legs once you start moving her she really takes on a character of her own as it appears she has her own freedom of movement. The strings can detach from the simple cross handle, meaning we can use the handle on our own puppets. 

Based on Marion, we have really been ‘thinking through making’ using plasticine, foil and string as well as fabric to figure out the movements and operations of marionettes. We have been focusing on making 2 legged marionettes initially to get a basic understanding first, but we want to ultimately end up with a four-legged animal puppet of some kind.

Jodie and I are approaching the making of the marionettes differently with a hope to combine our two practices further along in the project. Jodie understands the anatomy of animals and has a model making anatomical way of creating our first marionettes using the plasticine. As I am used to working with fabrics and often letting the material do the sculpting for me I found it difficult to piece together the different parts of the marionette using plasticine. Both of our attempts have their own characters and we agreed that using fabric will result in a more ‘lifelike’ character. Collaborating like this; working on the same thing but in different ways is very exciting and I hope that this momentum continues throughout the year.

Whilst Jodie has been focusing on making dinosaurs (we liked the idea of making a creature no one has ever seen and allowing it to develop characteristics we have no idea about), I decided to make an ostrich, as the long two-legged animal seemed like an easy shape to translate into a marionette. Using Marion as a base and as a sort of puppet ‘pattern’, I used calico to make the shapes of the body, head, neck and legs. I thought that the joints would need string to link them together to make them flexible, which is what Jodie had worked out using plasticine, so the head, neck and body were all linked with bits of twine, as well as the legs. As it turned out, the fabric had too much flexibility when held together like this. Even after I stuffed the material to thicken it was still too ‘wobbly’. I ended up taking all the string out and just stitching the different shapes together. I then weighted the feet with bolts and plasticine to add more control when moving it around. It was difficult to know where to put the strings as I wanted to keep a simple cross bar handle like on Marion, but after looking at the Basilisk marionette video on Youtube again we decided to put one string on the head to move in up and down easily; one on each ‘knee’ joint and one on the top back of the body. Currently this is how the puppet is, but the leg strings need adjusting because the weighted feet do spin around when you try to walk it. I am not sure whether this is because there is not enough leg support, but I think I might need to add a wire frame of some kind within the material. A wire armature would also make it more durable but keep it lightweight.

Weighting the feet with plasticine and bolts

I know I wanted to make an Ostrich, but now I think it looks more like a goose because I didn’t get the proportions quite right! I have begun to cut individual feathers from felt and loosely stitch them on and already I think this is adding to the puppets character and making it look more professional even though this is still only a first idea. I think if we can make a solid frame or armature then it will be exciting to see what materials we can then add to it to make it look more lifelike. There are so many different textures of fabric out there I think we can really go crazy and make something absolutely bonkers but that also has that ‘real’ movement we are after.

Jodie has been continuing to work on more puppets, each one increasing in size/decoration etc and they are becoming more and more life like. We think festivals are the perfect place to perform these as the festival community are generally more likely to want to connect with nature and get back to another way of living away from the realities of the modern world. They will expect to see things that they wouldn't usually be exposed to and therefore will be more likely to engage with our puppet.