A fashionable bat, a melancholy sun, and a springtime spirit with seasonal allergies are just a few of the characters conceived by Cat Johnston. Drawing on childhood memories, folk art, and nature, the London-based illustrator and model maker creates expressive sculptures and puppets that inhabit dreamlike realms.

Invoking historical costumes and cartoonish and emotive faces, Johnston’s otherworldly cast seems both familiar and strange, as if children’s book protagonists have sprung to life or converged with a strange dream. Recent characters comprise a series of gods representing sunburn, hay fever, and insomnia, which also—rather inconveniently—are the sun, flowers, and the moon.

Johnston recently made her first short film in collaboration with stop-motion animator and fellow puppet-maker Joseph Wallace called “The Wickywock and the Jubjub Berry.” As a mythical woodland creature deals with a bout of sleeplessness, a forest sprite appears with what seems like a practical solution, but things don’t exactly go as planned.

Coinciding with a local pagan festival called the Hastings Traditional Jack in the Green, which occurs every first weekend of May, Johnston will have a small solo exhibition at a local pub called The Crown. In addition to signing on to work with London-based cinematic studio Passion Pictures as a director, the artist continues to explore the possibilities of film.

Johnston is currently working on a few ideas for animated series and hoping to develop a slightly longer format stop-motion project while also working on another short film, “which will be a mix of live action puppetry and stop-motion animation and will feature two flowery monsters and an extremely cute bee,” she says.

You might also enjoy the quirky Hieronymus Bosch-inspired figures of Roberto Benavidez.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Folklore and Nature Converge in Cat Johnston’s Expressive, Eccentric Puppets appeared first on Colossal.

“Ice burns, and it is hard for the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost,” wrote A.S. Byatt in Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami characterizes ice in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman as a capsule that preserves the past “cleanly and clearly,” but possesses no future. In the ephemeral performance “MIZU,” frozen water takes on the form of a woman in an enchanting and emotive meditation on memory, time, and impermanence.

“MIZU” is the brainchild of puppeteer and director Élise Vigneron’s Théâtre de L’entrouvert and Companie Furankaï, which encompasses the work of choreographer and circus artist Satchie Noro. The composition highlights the fragility of our existence, the necessity of water, and “the passage from form to formlessness, from individual to cosmos,” Vigneron says.

The human body is around 60 percent water; the earth is covered by more than 70 percent. In “MIZU,” the title of which is named for the Japanese word for water (水), the human-size puppet double can be interpreted simultaneously as a unique individual and the dancer’s twin, with whom she communes and watches gradually disappear. “The melting of the ice reveals the nature of the double,” Noro says in a poetic statement. “The reflection slips away before I can escape it / After the ice, there is another material / A framework to explore / Dancing to find oneself again.”

The setting for the performance combines Noro’s interest in unique architectural apparatuses and environments outside of the traditional theater and Vigneron’s explorations of puppetry and creating forms with ice. Puppeteer Sarah Lascar controls the figure from the side and sometimes joins the dance to create a trio as is immersed in water.

“Mizu” is slated for performances throughout the summer at festivals and venues throughout Europe. Learn more on the production’s website. You might also enjoy revisiting Néle Azevedo’s “Minimum Monument.”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article ‘MIZU’ Contemplates Fragility and Impermanence in a Poignant Dance with an Ice Puppet appeared first on Colossal.