Desperate Characters in process

At the moment I find myself working on a farm and I have a live/work space that resembles the skeleton of an old barn. If I apply a little imagination, my current residence is not unlike the bones of the abandoned farm houses that populate Mercer County, Missouri, home of my pioneer ancestors.

Serendipitously, a friend from the farm introduced me to the musician, Clint Davis. I shared the names, date, places and faces that I had excavated from the bottom of an old box my mother inherited from her mother. Clint is from Kentucky and felt a genuine affinity for the stories of the people’s lives I was beginning to unravel. Clint’s select picks from his extensive catalogue in Americana music filled in the narrative of the script.

While I began sculpting the puppets and sets for the dioramas Clint also worked on composing original music for his band to play and record. Images and music: a dialogue had begun and a new collaborative process was born!

The sets are built on carts that wheel in and out of the performance space
The diorama for the opening scene in DCMC
Out front of S4A
The work studio of my loft will soon transform in a theatre space
Here I am in the loft looking down on the performance space below