Earlier this year, for a "30 Days" I was making cardboard chess-piece puppets. Seeing Jerome Kaplan's 1999 costume designs for The Nutcracker ballet had sown the seed of the idea. Into my notebook went images of Norman knights, Anglican Bishops, Medieval kings and Tenniel's queens from Through the Looking Glass.
Afterwards - the dreaded blank, when it's so easy to think "This is it, there's nothing left in me, I'm finished". Experience has taught me that the cure is to do something, anything ... and my fall back is daily drawing.
Opting to copy costume illustrations wasn't all that random a choice; I've loved historical dress since my early teens. The other, and far more significant decision was to drop the oars, so to speak, and see what happened.
Until I looked it up (out of curiosity) I hadn't realised that 'down the rabbit hole' comes from Alice's adventures in Wonderland, written in 1865.
Like Alice, I followed my curiosity, giving myself permission to stop trying to be an artist.
Oh...scary....
What's happened so far is dancing paper figures, 2D and 3D playing card queens (how I love those faces!), a mermaid automaton and most recently a Harlequina.
This........
.......became this
It has felt like I've gone back to a 10 year old self who begged wallpaper books from the shops in town and made shoe-box doll's houses and matchbox chests of drawers and pipe cleaner dolls... in whose small, personal universe all that mattered was heeding the impulse to create.
And in these past months most of my loves came together - image research (a veritable maze in its own right ) costume, puppets, theatre, construction, using whatever is to hand.
One last image ... a piece I made as a picture of the world inside my head.. who needs a rabbit hole?
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