Archives for posts with tag: life
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Packing up

July 31, 2014 //
5

suitcase

Oh dear, this year seems to be the year of best intentions. I am so sorry for having neglected my blog for some time. Though it doesn’t mean the Dedes have been neglected.

You might know I have lost a few of my major sources of income at the end of last year and I have been working hard to secure new income streams. Now six month later everything came to fruition at once and this just means I am rushed off my feet to fulfill all my promises. My book of “101 recipes with flour and water” is still not finished, however, I am using it a lot, but I am stuck on 51 recipes.  My backyard chooks deliver an invaluable addition to my diet too.

Recently I have taken on a part-time teaching job. My first salaried job in 20 odd years. Even though I have been teaching for a long time, it was always on a contract basis. It seems with a salary inevitably come the politics… Something I want to steer clear off as much as possible. Navigating the foul ground takes a lot of energy. Believe me, I feel some good puppet stories coming on….

The Festival of Performing Objects is about to start. This weekend I have to deliver the Dedes I want to show in the exhibition. Every Dede is keen to pack up and go. Some of them will just sit in the Gallery for the month, while others will get action in the stop-motion workshops of the last week. I have to make a decision who is going to do what. I did a lot of work in the early days of the organisation unfortunately with all the changes to my working life poor Kim (the manager of the arts centre) had to bear the brunt of the recent weeks. She did an amazing work luring puppeteers out of the underwood. I am very confident it will be a fantastic exhibition.

It looks like we are getting quite a bit of attention. The first article about the event was published this week.

HM puppets 28_7_14

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Categories Art, craft, Exhibition, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life, Promotion, Stop Motion, workshop

Gone bananas

July 18, 2014 //
0

Here is the second film we did last week. This one was created by a group of teenagers as a holiday programme. Pretty slim pickings, but we got there in the end. In this film the kids had to make their own actors and they also created the music, the backdrop and the props. I enjoyed working with the youngsters and I’ve learned a tremendeous amount. The kids on the other hand just thought I was weird… Happy, but weird!

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Categories Absurd, Art, Comedy, film, Fun, Life, Stop Motion, workshop

Good to be a Dede

June 30, 2014 //
2

chicken and nosy neighbour

Last weekend the Dedes were a bit upset with me for favouring the chickens. The birds showed up and I went all gooey. The Dedes have made such an effort over the last few months waiting patiently and quietly in the art cupboard for me to find my feet again. I do appreciate this but I don’t know how to express it. Nosy Neighbour, who always wants to know what’s going on, had a little peek today from the upstairs window to check out the new competition. I am pleased that he decided he wouldn’t swap places with them for anything in the world. And I hope he will tell all the others there is a clear benefit to being a Dede. You are allowed to stay inside when rain is pouring down outside.  On this rainy day I too found a new appreciation for the Dede folk. They don’t make a mess! I am not really looking forward to braving the elements and cleaning out the chicken mansion today. The girls are pretty messy!

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Categories Absurd, Art, Comedy, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life, Relationships, Social Network

Cat TV

June 29, 2014 //
0

chicken and cat

The neighbours have four or five cats and come dinner time a few strays find their way to their property for a free feed as well. The moving in of our boarders must have been the talk in the cat community yesterday. Last night, they behaved themselves and only observed from the far distance. Today a few brave ones came closer. The chickens are huge and I hope the cats think it’s TV not dinner. We have been assured the chooks will be able to defend themselves, in fact they can be very vicious. The last thing I want is some casualties on either side. At this stage, the neighbours are as excited about our ladies as we are. Should one of the cats come to harm it might be a different story.

The first night in the hen house was eventless. At nightfall, they all found their way into the chook mansion, we didn’t even have to round them up. When I closed the flap it was immediately lights out and they stopped talking.  I was surprised, as they came from different pens. I would have expected a bit of fighting over the best places on the roosts. Obviously there is a comfortable space for all of them. At half past seven this morning I heard them getting restless and I let them out again, hoping there would be some eggs. Though I was told they might take a break for three or four days while they were settling in. Sure enough the laying boxes were empty. Then after breakfast three of the brown hens were hanging suspiciously around the chook house. When I looked again later one of the boxes contained three eggs. How exciting! Good girls. The two black ones we have are too young to lay. The rest are heritage breeds that don’t lay as much as the brown ones, so no surprises there.

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Categories Fun, Life, Social Network

Sense of Normality

June 28, 2014 //
0

chicken

Today the chickens arrived. Their job is to dig over and fertilise our backyard. I am sure they will have a good life here. As you can see in the pic, our garden is rather overgrown. I am in love with them already. They are gorgeous animals and I am looking forward to keeping a chick diary. I might even start a new blog with chick pics only. Of course, the Dedes would be very unhappy if I started something new and neglected them in favour of some chickens. I can’t do that and I won’t do that. Over the last few months I have been working hard to get some gigs lined up for the Dedes. The week after next I am running two stop motion holiday workshops and I am currently consulting with the Dedes about who will be joining me for those. One of the workshops will be just one afternoon in the Orewa Library with kids between 10 and 12. The other one is at the Toi Ora Space and runs for four mornings. Toi Ora is an organisation that provides art workshops for people in support of their mental health and wellbeing. I am really looking forward to this one and I will write more about it in due course.

I also started my new job this week. I was mainly busy with preparations for the classes that will commence next week. Naughty Boy, one of the Lil’Dedes was keen to check out my new workplace and pestered me all week to take him with me. I assume he is sick of sitting in the art cupboard of my studio, which is  – needless to say – a very messy place. I was a bit worried that all the others might want to come as well, should I give in to his request. But he was so persistent that I finally caved in on Friday. He was whistling all the way to work, but then when we arrived, he took just one look at the desk and decided immediatly it wasn’t worth it. At home he told the others my new place was terribly sterile, not even a single leaf of paper on the desk. Certainly not a place where the Dedes would flourish. Phew!

naughty boy

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Categories Absurd, Art, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life, workshop

Travel

June 20, 2014 //
4

mr vague

I have started a new teaching job this week and had to fly to Christchurch for induction. The Dedes and I have a deal that when ever I go places I pick one of them to accompany me should there be space in my backpack. I believe they view this as an assurance I will return to them. This time I chose Mr Vague, a placid old fellow who goes with the flow. I certainly couldn’t have coped with one who wanted to paint the town red at night. I knew there would be a lot of information to take in during the day.

Right! He was so placid that he stayed in my backpack pretty much all the time. I was traveling with my new colleague Bonnie, who I met for the first time when I took my seat in the airplane. Mr Vague is very shy. That is why I took him. I thought he might come out of his shell when he is away from the other Dedes. But no, he stayed where he was because he heard us chatting away and did not want to impose. I wanted to show him the town centre that was struck by a horrific earthquake in 2011 and still looks like a battle field. As it is winter, it was dark by the time we left the art school. The town is also closer to the south pole than Auckland and therefore colder. I thought he might be interested in the Cardboard Cathedral, designed by disaster architect Shigeru Ban to temporarily replace the original cathedral that was damanged in the quake. After all, Mr Vague is made from the same material. He took a quick glance and said it is too cold to come out of the warm backpack.

We were there for two days and like all the Dedes he loves breakfast. So a cup of coffee finally lured him out for a quick chat in the morning. The warm ambience of the art noveau cafe suited him well and the coffee was excellent. That is all he needed to be content for another day and have a snooze while I was off to more induction.

The next time I saw him was when I arrived at the airport and heard that our plane would be delayed by 4 hours, which meant we wouldn’t be home before 2am. He shrugged the news off.  “Nothing you can do about it” he said and shouted me a beer. Neither of us got flustered – Mr Vague because he had slept for two days, and I because I was too tired.

Mr Vague at airport

 

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Categories Absurd, Art, Comedy, Hand Puppets, Life

A show for an egg

June 4, 2014 //
5

chook house

I did this puppet show last week. My first ever public one  (I had done one before, at the launch of my Hermit’s Web book, but I believe I must have known pretty much every single person of the hundred people who were attending the launch and I can’t really call this public.) I am not a performer. My intention with puppets is for people to participate in the play and tapping into their own creativity, rather than just producing a show for others to watch. Coming up with a storyline for puppets is an invaluable cathartic process.

Anyway, when my friend asked me to do a puppet show at her book launch I happily agreed. The subject of the book is something I strongly believe in. Now my friend has come up with another scheme I can’t say no to either. It is an arrangement that suits the Dedes to a T. You might know that we have just renovated our house and our backyard is a total shambles with heaps of rubble and mountains of dirt dug out from under the house. We will have to redesign our garden and now that I am working from home I am extremely keen to turn it into a producing vege patch.  My friend offered me her chickens for a few months to clear up and fertilise my backyard, so we can start planting in spring. Over Queen’s Birthday weekend we scavenged around our property to find material to build a chook house with. The old fence we took down did just fine. We even salvaged the nails that held it together and reused them. As it is with such things, what should have taken a day, took us three (two of them mainly scratching our heads), but we are now proud owners of a ramshackle chook mansion and are looking forward to receiving the lodgers.

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Categories Absurd, Art, Book Launch, Comedy, Fun, Life, Social Network

Good news, bad news

April 29, 2014 //
6

I had some good news recently: in August Puppet Festival at the Estuary Art Centre in Orewa is going ahead as planned. Kim Boyd, the Centre’s manager has allocated the entire month to all things puppetry. I am really excited as I hope it will show how diversified puppets can be. We have Anna Bailey, a puppeteer from Wellington, coming up for 2 weeks and running workshops on puppet making and she will also perform some of her wonderful string puppet shows. Sarah-Jane Blake a performance designer, working in the UK and in NZ will also run workshops on story development and telling. Finally in  the last week I will be facilitating stop motion animation workshops.

The Festival will start off with a buskers and market day on Saturday the 9th of August and then continues with an exhibition called “A story-teller’s world.” If you are in New Zealand and want to partake in the exhibition of puppets and other object which elicit imagination please get in touch with either me or the Estuary Arts Centre.

The bad news is that my Artstation workshop has once again very low enrolment numbers and is unlikely to go ahead. It is so sad that most people when they hear the word “puppet” dismiss it as a children thing, at least here in New Zealand.

While I was preparing my course, I came across this wonderful interview with the amazing Candadian puppeteer Ronnie Burkett by Gary Friedman (also a puppeteer working on a film about politicial puppetry at the moment). Ronnie explains so eloquently here what puppets are all about, its really worth watching.

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Categories Art, Exhibition, film, Hand Puppets, Stop Motion, workshop

White Elephants

April 17, 2014 //
2

Here it is, the long awaited sequel to “Life of an Artist”. One year on, L’Artiste is still saddened that his art wasn’t perceived that well last time. Remember he threw his tunic in an act of despair at the end of the original film? Obviously, Skeleton picked it up and kept it for him in her closet all this time. Now she thought it was about time for L’Artiste to snap out of it. Surprisingly, once he slipped back into his tunic, he regained his confidence (I wish I had a magic tunic like this :) But what am I saying to you… watch the film.

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Categories Absurd, Art, Comedy, film, Fun, Hand Puppets, Promotion, Social Network, Stop Motion

The sequel is coming

April 16, 2014 //
4

sequel

Finally I got round to attend to my Dedes and I made good progress on the sequel to “Life of an Artist”. I can tell you as much: Skeleton felt sorry for poor L’Artiste who was still stitting in the corner crying. She brought him his tunic back and convinced him to have another go. For the rest of the story you have to wait… I hope I will have the film finished by tomorrow.

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Categories Absurd, Art, Comedy, film, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life, Stop Motion
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