Archives for posts with tag: thoughts
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Me again

April 15, 2014 //
0

I though I’d share this page from the Artstation Term 2 Programme with you. It promotes my upcoming course. Kit Lawrence, the photographer,  has captured the essence of my art extremely well. Being a puppet artist suits me to a T. I love being in the background and happy for the puppets to have the limelight. They are such amazing creative tools. To be honest, the only difference between an object and a puppet is imagination. For me personally, having a sound imagination is extremly helpful in navigating modern life.

Term2programme

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Categories Art, Comedy, Fun, Hand Puppets, Life, Promotion, workshop

Retrospective

April 13, 2014 //
2

It is Easter again. It is around this time of the year it’s most noticeable to me that I have moved from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern. The weather is pretty much the same in both countries, but Germany is now moving towards the warm summer months and Easter marks the end of the cold, while here in New Zealand we start to batten down the hatches for winter. Last year at Easter I made my first stop motion film with the Dedes. It was a spur of the moment piece about the life of an artist. I have been wondering for a while if it is time for a remake. Nothing much has changed. A year, though, is not long enough really to justify a remake, or is it? Maybe I’ll make a sequel!

Here is the original.

 

Looking back even further, two years ago I created this sequence of images for the blog. Not a film yet, but it is clearly pointing towards film making :)

bunny1

bunny2

bunny3

bunny4

bunny5

bunny6

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

I was a shadow puppet

April 4, 2014 //
2

Here is a little treat for my blog followers. Only when you have the link can you watch this film, as it is unlisted on Youtube. It is a test of my shadow puppets for the film “Fat Legs & all“. Unfortunately, these original shadow puppets didn’t find the approval of the other parties involved and I had to modify them a little. I wanted to show the sponge puppets in a savage world. But I was told that for the sponges it is not so much a feeling of living in a hostile world, but rather one of seeking approval and understanding, as they are just ignored or made fun of.

I have to admit, I was a shadow puppet! Many people are surprised that neither of us who made the film suffer from Lipoedema ourselves. For me it was a “mea culpa” project. When Avril described to me what a Lipoedema sufferer might look like, I immediately remembered my best friend at Uni. For me personally body shape is of little importance. I side with my “No body” Dedes. What counts is what is in the head. However, my mate at Uni managed to aggravate me when we were out eating. She ate so little and pushed her food around her plate for ages.  Basically she ate very conscientiously and next to her I appeared like a caveman’s wife. I just gulped down what there was to eat. I always wondered what this was all about, as I ate far more, but was in much better shape. No, that’s not quite right… when sitting down, my friend looked like a real lady, but under the table it was a different story (the dress code at a baroque court would have suited her very well). And I admit it now, that I occasionally thought “If I were that unshapely, I would do something about it”.

After we finished our studies, our ways parted and I have long lost contact, but Avril’s description of the lipoedema figure brought back memories of all the good times I had with my friend.

 

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Categories Art, film, Life, Lipoedema, Medical, Social Network, Stop Motion

Premiere

April 3, 2014 //
4

Today is premiere day for my sponge puppet film. I will write more about it in the next few posts. Here just briefly what it is all about.

For this film I have teamed up with Avril Lunken, an lymphoedema occupational therapist from Melbourne and her daughter Tilly, a playwright in London. We thought the neutral medium of puppetry would be ideal to highlight this little-known condition which can make the lives of many women who suffer from it miserable. Lipoedema, is a condition where abnormal fatty deposits accumulate in the butt and legs but not the feet. Sometimes known as “painful fat syndrome,” women who have lipoedema often believe (or are told) they are simply over-weight but find that no amount of exercise or diet reduces the fatty deposits. Their legs and thighs are out of proportion with the rest of their body. This condition affects women only and manifests itself usually after puberty, child birth or menopause.

Imagine how soul-destroying it must be, when the only advice your doctor gives you is to loose weight, but you know too well you have already tried every diet under the sun. He then goes on to paint the bleakest picture what will happen if you don’t heed his advice…

With our film we want to reduce the prejudice towards those with the condition and instigate more research into the subject. During the next three days, Avril is presenting a poster at the 10th Australasian Lymphology Association (ALA) Conference here in Auckland. The film can be accessed by the participants of the conference via a QR code on the poster.

Life would become so much easier for sufferers, if only more people knew it is a medical condition and not a weakness of the will.

Please watch the film and share their story!

A big, fat Thank You!   Dietlind

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Categories Art, film, Hand Puppets, Lipoedema, Medical, Stop Motion

The loneliness of a busker

April 1, 2014 //
2

fundraising

Today I am quite down. I slept very poorly after yesterday. The interview didn’t go as I expected and I have the feeling I didn’t handle my latest project very well. Now that it is finished and I have had a bit of a breather, I realise that I was once again steaming ahead on a totally different track from all the others involved. Ah well, I guess that is the reason why I will stay a poor artist forever. In the meantime I have placed my busking penguin permanently in the corner of our staircase, hoping he will collect some change. Surprisingly he has… all those loose coins are from when we do the washing. Of course the corner of our steps is not a very public place so there is not much traffic for donations. Wrong decision again! Maybe I should place him at the garden gate, next to the letter box. But then, we live in suburbia… I don’t think it will make much of a difference.

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

Oops

March 24, 2014 //
2

cow and cushions

I had to go and get my picture taken for the next brochure of the community art school where I am having a puppetry workshop. To make it easier for me, I thought I take two puppets along to help. It went all okay, except that I’d rather had the pics of the puppets published, than my own mug. Anyway when the job was done, we were walking down the road, when Cash Cow all of a sudden stopped and screamed. She had discovered these cushions in the window of a shop. I think she will have nightmares tonight.

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Categories Absurd, Art, Comedy, Hand Puppets, Life, Promotion

The winner is…

March 21, 2014 //
1

byaleaf

I don’t know if I have already mentioned, that I have been assigned to judge the inaugural scarecrow competition at the community garden here in Beach Haven tomorrow. This will be a very busy day for me. I have to go to the garden to look at all the entries, then I have to come back home to run a Dede workshop and back to the garden to announce the winner.

The community garden is relatively new and as it is with such groups, money is an always short. So, I decided to reinvigorate one of my favourite prizes I awarded at many occasions while still studying. Take one bayleaf, spray paint with metalic gold (donated by the artschool) and put in a nice looking but cheap frame from the bargain bin. I wanted to have a leaf in gold, silver and bronze. Unfortunately there were only cans in gold, silver and red. Never mind, red is a nice colour too. The local chocolate shop has also donated four boxes of chocolates. I hope the scarecrows will be happy and the weather gods are favourable.

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Categories Absurd, Art, Competition, Fun, Life, Promotion

New projects

March 10, 2014 //
6

lizzie carol and esther

Last Friday I finished Lizzie’s film (Lizzie is the pink one in the middle). It is now awaiting music and a last edit from the script writer. This is a project I started last year together with an Australian therapist, who I met at a puppet workshop in Melbourne. The film is to raise awareness of Lipoedema, a condition that is present in 11% of the female population, and it will premiere at a conference in Auckland in three weeks. I will show it in due course on the blog.

Now that one major project is finished, I asked what we should do next and it turns out that two puppets are already working on new projects. L’Artiste has to create  a set of new puppets for a nutritional blog that Garden Guru Dee Pigneguy has just started. If all goes to plan, L’Artiste’s puppets will be present at the launch of Dee’s new book in the Takapuna Library next month. He has shown me his ideas on paper and I love them. L’Artiste is a very quiet worker and an extremely reliable guy, so I am pretty sure we will see his creations soon.

Witch, who is into nutrition as well had an idea of her own. She has always been a strong believer in cooking everything from scratch. She doesn’t buy bread or spaghgetti from the shop. She makes it herself and along the way she experiments with all sorts of ingredients, like buckwheat grouts or teff flour. Most of the time she can’t repeat what she cooked, as it is all chucked together, but anything she cooks is a treat. I can’t ever remember her presenting us with something ineditable. The weirder the better. Unfortunately the Dede household is pretty strapped for cash at the moment, so fancy ingredients are off the menu for a while. Instead of moping and complaining that she can’t fulfill her job description as the supplier of nutritional food, she decided to turn the shortcomings into a challenge. She is working on a recipe book with the working title “The artist’s survial cook book –  101 meals made from flour and water“. We discussed her draft yesterday, and while I have to admit she is cheating a little, (she uses, in fact, a handful of ingredients in different combinations) I am totally amazed at how many different things she can conjure up with those few really basic ingredients.  On top of it, none of them seem to be very time consuming. (Oh sorry, yes, flakey pastry does take a bit of time, that’s why we only get it on very special occasions.)

The books starts off with the basic of all basics: Bread buns, which she is baking for lunch today. I asked her to take photographs and maybe we can have the recipe on the blog as a teaser tomorrow.

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Categories Absurd, Art, Book Launch, Comedy, Fun, Hand Puppets, Promotion, Social Network

Devil’s viewpoint…

January 26, 2014 //
5

devil explain

Devil and I had breakfast together. I know he is extremely scathing about the committee when he is with Mouse, or so Mouse says. They have been good mates for years, and I assume he feels he can let rip.When I last spoke to Mouse she said he didn’t think he made any mistakes at all. But when I listened to Devil, his point of view didn’t seem particularly skewed, it all made perfect sense to me.

Right away he made it clear he wasn’t unhappy he lost this particularly ungrateful job. Nobody appreciated his efforts and the committee were the worst. To be honest, they had no clue what they wanted, nor did they know what is involved in a spokesperson’s job, but they expected miracles from him. Their motto basically is, we say jump and you jump, to hell with the implications. And while one member of the committee said jump to the right, the other said jump to the left, so he ended up standing in the middle of the road. Just look back at the last year. One day they wanted a zazzle shop, the next day they wanted to sell books, then they wanted a facebook page, a week later they thought workshops would be all the rave… and each time they expected him to put his full heart into the campaign while he knew very well that next week at least one of them would change their mind. He tried to tell them they should focus, it’s no good trying everything, but they didn’t want to listen to his expertise and it got really, really tiresome in the end. He got so sick of the uphill battle. Good luck to  Magician. But of course, he will be the hero for a while as new brooms always sweep clean.

“So why are you so down then? You should be skipping and dancing. It sounds like it was a job from hell anyway.” I asked.

“I am simply grieving for the engery I spent” he said. “You know I am not the youngest anymore. In fact I am the oldest of the Dedes. It gets more and more difficult to re-invent yourself, but that is what I have to do!”

Good on you, Devil!

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

What now?

January 13, 2014 //
2

devil bed

I hope you all know that the film was not real! Of course the Dedes wouldn’t be that vicious in real life. They wouldn’t try to decapitate the poor Devil, though in every story there is a bit of truth. Some parts of the film are recounted correctly: Devil got the sack last week and after having talked to a few puppets, that seems to be final. There is no way for him to get back his position. They have already appointed a new spokesperson. Devil knows that and now he is not getting out of the sack in the mornings. Of course we all know that there will be brighter times again, but right now he is inconsolable. Mouse says she has been there a few times herself and she can sympathise how difficult it must be for him to see the light at the end of the tunnel. She wouldn’t be surprised if he had nightmares too, but no words of consolation would help at this stage. He has to go through this in his own time.

Nobody has seen the old fellow since he took part in the film on Saturday. I had a little peek in the corner of the stage. He obviously just rolled over after the filming had finished and pulled the blanket back over his head. Mouse begged me to leave him alone for a while. He has to grieve and come to terms with the injustice he thinks he has received.

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