Beep Beep Puppetry
by Simon Heafield
The puppets featured in this photoshoot are all part of a series I started building two years ago, which I call Flappies. They’re glove puppets, meaning your outer digits fit inside their arms, with the middle and index finger in the head, but they have an added feature not found on most glove puppets: a moving mouth, in the form of a flap (hence the name). With solid or stuffed heads (eg Mr Punch or Sooty), most glove puppets rely on exaggerated and stylised movements to accompany their speech, which can be thrilling to watch, but I’ve found the moving mouth in these characters enables them to express themselves with an extra degree of subtlety.
The first one I made was the yellow one with blue hair, known as Harold. I threw him together with a bit of white fleece and some foam just to see if the design actually worked but I found that even in his rudimentary form there was a spark of character to him, so I tossed the whole puppet in a dye bucket, and added some blue fur and those hypnotic black eyes to complete the look (the dungarees came much later, when I started to feel it was unacceptable for all of my puppets to be nude). For something intended as a quick prototype Harold has become one of my most popular characters.
Sometimes I’m inspired by the materials I have available: the shrimp came about because I overdyed some fleece I was preparing for making pig puppets and needed to find a way to use a length of deep cerise fleece. The two pigs and the wolf were developed specifically for a show I created based on The Three Little Pigs, which I took to the Beverley Puppet Festival this summer. The wolf is the most complicated of the three, because of his carved skull and the more intricate patterning that goes into making sure the nap of the fur is all going in the right direction. The pigs are more simple in construction, but the effort really went into the styling and in particular the clothes. I’ve never made human clothes before and puppet clothes come with their own challenges - not least of which is the lack of puppet-size patterns. The fur coat was a new addition to Mrs Pig’s look, created specially for the photoshoot - but it suits her character so much I plan to add it into the show.
The goal of puppetry is to make inanimate objects appear alive, which the puppeteer usually achieves through a combination of breath, movement and focus. In a still medium like photography puppets can easily turn into lifeless soft toys, which is why I was so thrilled to see Adrian’s photographs of my puppets, in which he’s truly brought them to life with his artistry. I look at those photos and don’t see the bits of fabric I’ve sewn together and bundle into suitcases to take to shows, but rather living, breathing characters with inner lives of their own. There’s something miraculous about it to me, and I’m just overwhelmed with gratitude for the way that Adrian’s skill and vision has elevated my work and from it created something new and something genuinely beautiful.
