 |
| Mermaid Parade, Coney Island, 1991, photo illustration |
Realizing my true calling at 50! At 4am I woke up unable to sleep, thinking about how I could convert my new garage into a puppet making facility. The more and more I thought about it the more excited I got...when I realized, I have always been interested and involved in puppetry of some sort. I guess I just never identified as a puppeteer because I never performed with any of my creations or thought of myself as a sculptor.
 |
| HR Pufnstuff |
Growing up in the 1960's and 70's in America I watched numerous TV shows with puppets. Shows such as: Sesame Street, Davie & Goliath, Mister Rogers, Captain Kangaroo, Gumbi, The Banana Splits, HR Puffinstuff and The Muppets. While often I felt the content was silly I was mesmerized by these animated characters.
 |
| Working on the clay set for the bar room series. 1990 |
I had some finger puppets as a child and made my first puppet when I was 12. In college I found myself making clay characters and sets. The first was a set and characters for
Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", when I was 20. Two years later, after trying to make an animated film about race relations I realized I didn't have the patience for animation. I kept on making the clay figures as a form of 2-D illustration-though never making the connection that they could be 3-D puppets.
 |
| Self-Portrait, photo illustration, 1989 |
 |
| Peewee Herman, photo-illustration, 1989 |
 |
| Barman, photo-illustration, 1987 |
 |
| Carney Girl, photo illustration, 1996 |
These images sold as illustrations over the next 15 years before I abandoned the process. In the meantime I'd been painting portraits, another passion of mine for years. I became obsessed with painting large heads.
 |
| Laughing Geisha, photo illustration, 1989 |
 |
| Prince Valient, encaustic, mixed media, 2008 |
|
Over the years I collected heads, faces and masks without even realizing
the underlying connection until someone pointed out that my home was
filled with them.
 |
| A few of my little heads. |
I visited Allen Cook in Pasadena to view his collection. (What a piece of LA film and TV history that needs support!) After meeting Alan, I even considered making a documentary on puppeteers.
 |
| Alan Cook discussing the different forms of puppetry. |
 |
| Alan spent an hour showing me thousands of puppets stashed away, while I shot hundreds of reference photos. |
I'm not sure what inspired me to go abroad and study traditional marionette carving in the Czech Republic in the summer of 2005, but once I did, the spark was ignited. I'd never seen such progressive and traditional, creative, mature theater work with puppets until I attended the puppet festival in Prague. The
HERE Theater in New York has also been a place of reference for innovative puppetry. After that summer, I brought students to the Czech Republic in 2006 for a similar workshop and started introducing puppetry into my studio art classes over the next few years.
 |
| Me and my students in Zapy, the Czech Republic, 2006 |
|
|
 |
| Students carving their puppets late into the night. |
From there I created an intersession course and then a full semester course for high school students in the various forms of puppetry.
I even got permission from the
Tiger Lillies band to use their music for student puppet videos. I had so much fun teaching the class that I wanted to make the puppets bigger. I had dabbled in making large paper mache heads in a school production of "Faust" but found them a bit crude and clumsy looking.
The next step was to learn about pageant puppetry. With my two art department colleagues and a former student (Currently in college studying puppetry!) we traveled to Italy one summer in 2013. (I mention this in an earlier Blog post.) This is when I had an epiphany. After working 10 days straight constructing large puppets without knowing how we would manage to pull off a procession, the local people showed up. About a 100! It was so exciting to see how all ages had participated in dropping by to help us and then, how all ages participated in the procession. This is when I realized that this is what I wanted to do with my art making skills. Share them and bring people together!
That same year, a local store was going out of business and I purchased some amazing
Wayang Golek rod puppets and shadows puppets from Indonesia. The broken puppets were donated so I had my student re-purpose them into new creations.
With over 10 large scale puppets left over from a school production of the Canterbury Tales, I started asking friends and neighbors to puppeteer and brought the puppets to a few local events.
The enthusiasm generated from the reaction of an audience to the puppets got me thinking about starting a puppet making performance group, hence, the birth of The Trompin' Manikins'. With a few meetings and numerous workshops, the creation of a logo and this blog, I started applying for local grants to get the project underway.
 |
| Hillary with Coney Island Man, 2006 |
 |
| Hillary with Moby, 2014 |
