The World On A String Puppet Show

Puppetry was practiced in Ancient Greece, and the Greek word translated as "puppet" is "νευρόσπαστος" (nevrospastos), which literally means "drawn by strings, string-pulling",from "νεῦρον" (nevron), meaning either "sinew, tendon, muscle, string", or "wire", and "σπάω" (spaō), meaning "draw, pull".

About last week I started working on my piece for the Florida CraftArt exhibition curated by a friend of mine, Christine Renc-Carter, from Dunedin Fine Art Center. Since I have never ventured to think about puppets before, I wasn't sure how to approach this, but as usual I was up for the challenge! I wanted to come up with something different than you would expect to see at a puppet exhibit.  This show has come right after my latest duo exhibition, In Our Wake, where I featured a lot of natural found objects.   I continued to use found bits and pieces from nature for this "puppet". The special thing about this show is that a collector will be displaying his puppets that he's been gathering from around the world. There are 10 other St. Petersburg, Florida artists that were invited to participate and create their own puppets. So far here are some detail shots of what I have come up with.  You will see the final piece on opening night at the end of June. I'm really looking forward to this exhibit because puppets, in my opinion, are like cousins to masks.