Picture Storytelling Gifts

There's been a little flurry of anniversaries of late, requiring gift-making tasks...

Firstly, a birthday crankie for my brother, featuring in the foreground his black Volkswagen beetle. I ended up making the scrolling picture and wrapping it up without photographing it, but the moving picture tells the story of my brother escaping his high-pressure job, jumping in the VW and hopping over the channel to France to have a picnic with his lady.
















For a special Valentines day project I made this pop-out card, out of train tickets used to travel to the individual in question. Pop-out card includes a mini car, with me in it, travelling via a long piece of string to the special individual in question who waits in a little treehouse. Does that all make sense?














For my flatmate Sara's 30th I rustled up "The Theatre of Halves" - a character-creating and character-halving game involving an Indian holy man, an Austrian folk dancer and a medieval street performer...

The Liminal Space Pop-up Shop

I have spent the larger part of this year engrossed in a very special project. From March to April my partner in crime Sara and I took over a disused shop in Chalk Farm, North London, and turned it into a storytelling craft centre. 'Liminal Space' was inspired by the magical power of fairytales and folk tales, in combination with archaic, mysterious visual storytelling craft techniques.



Each week we had a different folk tale theme, and our workshops drew imagery and ideas from these stories. Stories were cut up and put into story bags, moments were fished out and visual worlds created using pop-up and paper automata, toy theatre, crankie, mask and puppet-making techniques.









Down in the basement, a medieval king and queen guarded the Storytelling Den, complete with its eternally renewing apple tree. There lights twinkled, witching songs were sung and tales told.





But now 'tis nothing but a disused dry cleaners again.

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.