The Wedding Owl

Needing a wedding gift for my beloved's sister recently gave me the wonderful opportunity to make a miniature toy theatre embedded within an owl. Something I've wanted to do for a long time.









The miniature theatre casement contains the sequined initials of the newly-weds glued onto the ends of two painted coffee stirrers, enabling them to dance about in wild, heady bliss.

Pictures that Pop Up

Last monday evening I ventured across cold, wet London on my bicycle to find the most steamy windowed, patterned tabled, cosiest little cafe of them all - Olivers Cafe in Belsize Park - where I discovered three women seated at a table covered with the most bewilderingly beautiful collection of hand-crafted books. I had come to a Pop Up Book workshop organised by Transition Town Belsize, but the problem was I didn't have much inclination to make anything myself when surrounded by such inspiring artworks to leaf through. One sassy community artist lady had brought in a collection of 'shared' reclaimed books that she had made with her friends. She would find a book, decorate the cover, give it a theme and title, embellish the first couple of pages and then send it by post to another friend. Like visual chinese whispers the book would be posted around the world until finally it returned to her, filled with unexpected delights.
We spent the evening gazing at hand-made and professionally published pop up art books, attempting to follow complex instructions in How To guides, and generally getting hysterically over-excited about the cross-overs between pop-up books, toy theatre and paper arts. All hail, pictures that pop up...

David McCandless - picture truth-teller

'Billion Dollar-o-Gram'

I've mentioned in this blog my thoughts on how verbal language can distort reality whereas pictures cannot really lie - well David McCandless is a London-based 'data designer' who is very much on a mission to spell out the truth about date by turning it into pictures. It's astounding to see how he takes facts and figures that get thrown at us all the time and turns them into visual images which, at last, allow us mere humans to see the 'bigger picture'. It's crazy how many times you can hear sums like £500 billion spoken about in the news but they don't sink in until you actually see them - alongside others. And when you gaze at the contradictions (eg. estimated cost of war in Iraq versus actual cost - imagine comparing the size of an arm band with the size of a swimming pool?) you begin to wonder whether a lot of powerful, clever people take advantage of the fact that information without visuals is protected information.

I told you all here first....the picture world is the truth-telling world.
And how exciting that someone intelligent, eloquent and very computer savvy such as David McCandless realises this too.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/the-true-size-of-africa/

The Weeping Tree in dim light...

Some nice monotone shots of a December showing of The Weeping Tree, taken in Central School of Speech and Drama's Puppetry studio.

Toy Theatre and Improvised Storytelling

Possibly more fun than making a performance is to make a performance-generating device...such as this toy theatre, complete with four different moving scenes and a range of characters/creatures on sticks. What stories will your friends come up with? If forced to use the characters and scenes in a particular order what will happen?
Toy theatre as a gateway to the subconscious...?

The Weeping Tree

Toy theatre performance created entirely out of cardboard and mount board. Performed at the CSSD Student Puppet Festival, London (2010) and the Great Small Works International Toy Theater Festival, New York (2010)

Picture Storytelling Scroll

Traditional picture storytelling scroll detailing the history of the art of picture storytelling from its origins in 6th Century India to its off-shoots in Asia, Europe and America. (2010)