It's all about me...
I’ve been excited by the limitless possibilities of puppetry since I was a child. With a comedy producer (Jonathan James-Moore) and an English/Drama Literature teacher (Jenny Baynes) for parents, I was lucky enough to grow up within an eccentric and colourful environment of creativity, jokes, literature, stories and playfulness. I spent hours dressing up, making things and inventing plays. The magpie in me loves to collect and play with sparkly, glittering things – whether they’re sequins or ideas – and I’ve always enjoyed experimenting with textures, colours and fabrics. What I love about puppetry is that I can utilise colour and texture in unusual and interesting ways, and create a kaleidoscopic mish-mash of ideas, expressions and moods.
The enormous scope for personal expression makes puppetry a very healing, life-enhancing and liberating art form: in every show a new universe can be invented from scratch. You can make up your own rules, then bend them or even abandon them all together if you feel like it. If you are in charge of the fate of your universe you can take enormous risks in complete safety, and this is really important for me. Darkness doesn’t have to be an oppressive unknown: with puppetry, it can be a blank canvas full of vibrant possibilities. As the puppeteer, you can confront and even animate your gremlins (grief, disability or boredom); you become the manipulator rather than the manipulated and you regain control.
Puppetry is such an intimate form of expression; I hope that the combination of my personal experience – both good and bad – and my love of making things gives my puppet shows a ramshackle, vibrant uniqueness and originality. I want my puppet shows to make people feel in the same way that puppetry makes me feel, to let them escape into a new world where they can laugh and cry without censoring themselves.