people in animation who were in the studio all of the time and had all of these frames. I was always looking at other people’s work while I was in illustration, and realized I don’t love making images as much as working on all of these other components. What was your puppeteering class like? Did it sort of bring back your interest in performing from high school? Yeah! I took a class with Erik Sanko who is the cofounder of Phantom Limb Company, which is a theatrical production and puppetry company that is based in New York. I took that class, and nobody was ever really in class. I had one idea in mind, and the first three months of the course I was researching handwriting at the library. It brought up a lot of the things that I mentioned earlier with my journals, so I made this project that involved three puppeteers puppeteering this giant hand holding a brush which would create this collective consciousness while they tried to use it to write. I knew what I wanted it to be going into it, but I learned a lot of things by performing with other people. I knew I wanted three Type A personalities because I knew I wanted to have these three people in a tug-of-war for control. There was a conflict with the three people having a common goal in mind but still wanting to be in control, and I wanted to see how that was articulated in the handwriting. I wrote a three page artist statement that I sent to all of them that was almost… unreadable in a lot of way, haha. There were all of these directions around how you should hold it and what you should be thinking. It was really interesting to start to do it for the first time with other people and realize that there are so many things that you do that you don’t think about automatically. I had everyone write out their handwriting, just to see what it looked like and compare them. I realized that wasn’t helpful. Everyone crosses their T from left to write, but some people do Os backwards or people
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