(Continued) Form 2 printer. We call it the “magic cupboard”. You send files down a usb cable to a cupboard, then several hours later a tangible design appears! I love being able to scale and iterate my work, and the digital pipeline enables me to do this. I can work with the same character and re-pose them in different dimensional illustrations and then print them out. I have made automata, and Zoetropes using 3D printers that would been incredibly difficult to make by hand. I still paint and costume all my dolls and toy by hand, and just use 3D printing in the sculpting process. I also sculpt by hand, but I find the output is slightly wonky and not symetrical - my hands shake a bit, but I see this as all part of the physical authenticity of the piece. I find nothing beats being able to see your work tangibly, and I find when I am working with polymer clay pieces I am definitely more experimental, as I still tend to work out the design as I am going along. What’s going on in your head when you work on a piece? Your fears, anticipation, confidence, etc. How do you know something is finished?
Something is finished when it hits the deadline! I am a bit of a night owl and I tend to keep working on my dolls right up until the moment they head to the gallery. I find doll-making really cathartic, and very really do I love the process. I find my technical limitations frustrating sometimes, and I need to take the time to do each step properly, especially where sometimes I am just too eager to get to the next step. Sometimes a doll just doesn’t speak to me and I need to put it aside and work on something else. I often work on several pieces at once so that I can vary the work. Even if I do put a doll down, I will go back and finish it. Some of my most favourite pieces are remade dolls. What does the future hold for your puppetry and film-making? We are seeing quite a resurgence for the handmade and tangible puppets, prosthetics and models being used within film and animation. Tangible designs are real, they are governed by real world physics and can do some really unexpected things when challenged.
