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Out with the old, in with the new... puppets are extinguished in the flames at the 2012 Westcountry Storytelling Festival.

Hands of Welcome

It was wonderful to draw from a folk arts tradition which really fascinates me, in making the 'hands of welcome' for the Westcountry Storytelling Festival. I wanted the outstretched hands to be like maps, treasure maps, landscapes of story - and these thoughts led me to the visual storytelling tradition which began in 6th Century India and which Victor H. Mair refers to as "Picture recitation".

I've been entranced by different manifestations of 'picture storytelling' throughout ages and cultures - all involving visual stories intricately laid out on cloth, paper or stone to form an elaborate story map. I made my own storytelling scroll a few years ago, telling the very story of the picture storytelling tradition from its origins in early India to Asia, the Far East, Europe and North America... I performed it, accompanied by my accordion, to some fellow university students but the narration involved a heavy amount of facts delivered at a very quick pace and I've been a little afraid of performing it again...

The elaborate story landscapes of 'picture recitation' were the inspiration behind these festival signs, and the story imagery itself came from another favoured world of mine - medieval woodcuts.

Nb. as a maker of storytelling scrolls my colour palette definitely seems to have settled within the dusky pink and burgundy range - due to the colour scheme of the charity shop duvet cover which formed the background of my first scroll. Time to hit the charity shops again I feel.

It was a real honour for me to create two 'storytelling backdrops' for the Westcountry Storytelling Festival, knowing that these would set the scene for the stories that would be told before them. It was a chance for me to do what I love most - bridge the verbal world of storytelling with the world of pictures, imagery and symbolism, allowing the listener's imagination to travel into the visual realm... Screens were made on the festival's theme of "Patterns under the Plough". Each screen features a collaged landscape made of William Morris prints, beneath a starry sky and moon - one screen based on dawn, one on dusk.

Storytelling shards

I am still settling in the aftermath of the 2012 Westcountry Storytelling Festival. Gosh, months of imagining and three weeks of frenzied making, in an attempt to give visual form to stories. These visual forms included the two dimensional and the three dimensional, the static and the animated. Firstly, the green man and the corn dolly, whose lives began as flimsy chicken wire shapes on my roof terrace, and ended as huge, heavy beings, leaning on each other in a fire pit as flames licked them all around, within a ring of cheering onlookers. Making these two beings, I realised that there is a distinct point at which you start 'believing' in the thing you have made - at which it comes alive before your eyes. Sometimes I have never reached that point with my creations - despite any praise given to me I have ended up unsatisfied, moving straight onto the next project in an attempt to deal with the feeling. But this time, there was a point when, at last, I felt like a stranger to what I had made, and it leapt to life. In this case it was the saturday afternoon at the Storytelling festival, when I went to the small, forested outdoor venue where the puppets had been placed, and found the breton-influenced trio Humdrazz playing their pipes and fiddle beneath the towering green man. I sat, listening to the music, and finally saw the green man as a whole, mysterious fellow with a head full of unfathomable thoughts. For that reason I felt satisfied to release the couple into the flames the following evening.