29 Mar Daisy Jordan
April 2022
This work was produced during the first month of her residency at AADK. She fell in love with Casa Jasmin as soon as she saw it, and immediately could see so many little spaces for puppets or small creatures to occupy.
The focus of her residency is to explore ideas surrounding boundaries, thresholds and “the other”, with an emphasis on non-human primates. As marginal creatures, monkeys and apes appear to hover on the boundary between ourselves and the rest of the animal kingdom. With this in mind, she started to create animation sketches using both -plasticine and glove puppets at liminal points and thresholds in the space- such as keyholes, stairways and mirrors.
In folklore, magical transformations often occur at such liminal spaces, and they are often considered to be vulnerable points of entry for demons from other realms. Reflections and hair have become important motifs, as well as the central characters that appear in the short animation sketches. The audio was created by responding to and recording various sounds around Casa Jasmin. These little scenes then started to inspire a story, and she is currently continuing to explore this narrative and also starting to think about how she can perhaps combine live puppetry performance with the animation projections.
May 2022
This month Daisy wanted to explore how our human relationship with nature, animals, and objects may have been influenced by the Victorian era, focusing on monkeys as intermediary creatures.
Monkeys have often served as a means to help us navigate our complex relationship with the natural world and our place within it.
Daisy has been exploring this mostly through the capuchin monkey, a “New World” primate, which became a popular pet and status symbol for the colonizing European Upper classes.
The western Victorian period is characterized by the conquest and pillaging of “new” lands, domestication, and mass production following the industrial revolution and the invention of the printing press.
Through the interaction between her created “Victorian lady” character and her capuchin glove puppet, she has been investigating the thresholds between the wild and domesticated, the commodification of the non-human, and the replacement of the “’real’ by the artificial.
This investigation is a work in progress.
