Miniature R&D

I’ve been making a tiny macaque puppet. He’s really tiny! I’m hoping to use him in a miniature suitcase show based on some of the work I did when I was at my art residency in Blanca in 2022.

I also made a little rooster automata with a clothes peg. I kept seeing things like it online and then paid a fiver for a little tutorial from robives.com which was great!

I’m just playing around at the moment. I have been working on quite an extravagant and epic story which is of course becoming way too complicated for what I would like to be a very small and intimate little show - probably less than half an hour long and for no more than 15 people at once.

As you can see, the little monkey is wearing a strange helmet/ mask that is reminiscent of the Devil. This piece is inspired by medieval folklore comparing monkeys to devils. I didn’t think of this at the time, but in retrospect the mask makes me think of “Schandmasken” (masks of shame) - iron masks used to mock the wearer by reflecting the nature of their supposed crime.

Some of the thoughts behind this idea are that I feel non-human primates still carry the burden of some of our darkest projections. In Western culture at least, monkeys and apes have always disturbed us by calling into question our separation from the rest of the animal kingdom. They have often been too close for comfort, and perhaps remind us of our own barely suppressed bestial nature.