INTER MEDIA

Trapped in a coffin with nothing to do… is an installation by artist Jack Cheetham. With the help of community and puppetry, the exhibition speculates on visions of future hometowns, families, loves, demons, and pals.

The interactive installation is an imagining of a forgotten puppet show that takes place in and around ruined castle grounds, set in the year 2066, in the fictional town of Helldham, Angelshireland. The puppet show has been abandoned due to a mass puppeteer revolt. The show is full of knackered puppets (to be reanimated by the exhibition’s audience, becoming the puppeteer), in which several characters together try to break up with the main character, the Castle.

Some of Cheetham’s characters featured in the show include: Castle; Castle Babe; The Chimneys; The Hands of G’rem; and a cult made up of Freshly Baked Revolutionary Village Bread.

Puppets have a ‘life of their own’, and Cheetham is interested in how puppet play is used in theatrical and therapeutic contexts, and how it can be used as an alternative mode of communication through roleplay as a treatment for trauma.

The exhibition will examine the potential and ongoing failures of its creators through the imagining of a certain consumer-driven fantasied moment in time. It will be rooted in contemplations around consumer cultures, labours, and legacies. It will also incorporate expanded forms of caricature, cartooning & character design. All are realised as a mode of personifying, exhausting, and evaporating the effects that objects and materials can have on people and their communities over time.

Jack Cheetham is an artist and educator. He was raised in Derbyshire, England, and has lived in Glasgow since 2012. Since studying on the MFA programme at Glasgow School of Art, he has also focused on community arts work & teaching.