Sylvanus meets the Princes in the Tower

What happens when medieval folk and Sylvanus the puppet collide?

In His Shoes...

A pair of shoes can tell a thousand stories. I recently visited 'Walking In My Shoes', an exhibition of 50 pairs of historic shoes, and came out realising that if an object has the combination of a practical use and aesthetic appeal, it can hold infinite meaning.

http://www.southwark.gov.uk/info/200162/the_cuming_museum/1607/temporary_exhibitions/2

With that in mind I decided at long last to make some shoes for my puppet Sylvanus, whose bare foam feet have been a disgrace for a couple of years now.

Crankie Workshop with Transition Town Belsize

Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of showing around ten members of Transition Town Belsize the simple, limitless potential of the "crankie" miniature theatre. In the warming, colourful ambience of Oliver's Village Cafe in Belsize Park the participants made their own crankie theatres using cereal boxes, wooden dowel, and various handles, nuts and bolts made of cardboard, reinforced wool and wooden coffee stirrers (yes, coffee stirrers.....spot their many uses in previous blog posts here).




By the end of the evening we had a full range of finished crankie theatres, and even a couple of finished moving picture scrolls within them, including one inside a Ricola throat sweet box, using straws as rods.



Next time I relish dabbling in collaborative crankie-making...how to tell ever-evolving stories passed from one person to the next like picture Chinese Whispers.

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.