In my practice I fabricate mixed media, wire armature puppets and sculptural sets, used for filming stop-motion animation. I use a fusion of well-planned engineering prep and conscious selection and shaping of materials to create puppets and sets that meet the physical demands of stop-motion production, as well as expressive characters that convey the narratives I’m portraying. My materials involve a wide array of physical media: wire, metals, foam, wood, plaster, latex, paint, paper, fibers, and plants. I love working in sculptural mediums for the puppets because it’s a way to create an emotive quality that I find best expressed in the manipulation of materials inherent to stop-motion puppets.

I’m creating these puppets from the ground up, with wire armatures, foam padding, latex layers and paint, as well as bits of reclaimed materials, which I find intriguing due to these little memories that used materials hold. I like the thought of a material having a history, and the idea that I can combine the memories of use in materials with my own hard memories, as a way of re-constructing emotional events from my life, that I’m not able to express otherwise. When I work with fabrics I am connected to warm memories of the women in my family, while working with wood and plants brings up positive memories of my father. The cold feel and angular nature of metal, wire, and bits of cast off electronics, carry an analytical perspective for me, and bring out harsh memories of familial dysfunction. I draw from these references when using reclaimed materials to fabricate my stop-motion environment. But also to create narratives of emotional states that can show our connection to one another, based on our similar experiences.

I prefer the stop-motion medium because I feel that these puppets have a unique way of capturing emotion-filled moments and preserving them in time, one linked to another, and I can direct those moments onto a path of my own creation. Sometimes the path changes as I’m animating, so I have this opportunity to explore a more meaningful expression of my ideas. When I created my first stop-motion puppet in 2019, I embedded bits of discarded hardware and electronics under its skin, and imagined this temporary creature mutating itself with outside influences over a lifetime. It occurred to me how technology can become so embedded in our lives that it becomes hard to imagine existence without it, and I was struck with the narrative for Saturation. This two-year work is a stop-motion animation of a future when humanity is so over reliant on the creation of its own technology, that it becomes saturated with it, to the exclusion of meaningful connection with other human beings, spirituality, and the natural world. Expressing emotional conditions akin to isolation and spiritual emptiness, the narrative of Saturation can be seen as a reflection on our current society. My animation and inherently distressed characters represent a reconstructed moment of time, giving memories a new life, and a new interpretation. In essence, re-animating memories to produce new pathways of thinking, and the possibility of a new outcome. This is, for me, the most important part of my practice.