It was a horrid, cold, snowy Sunday here in Whitstable, and I hardly went outside at all apart from to scamper to the shops to get some milk and hurried back again. So I spent the afternoon making a tiny paper forest on my table top, but a forest in summer, in moonlight, somewhere i wanted to escape from the wintry weather to.

Last weekend I was over in Paris where my hubby is based for a few weeks. Paris means Picasso for me, amongst other things, as it’s where he made his home for most of his life and where he created so much of his work. While I was there I spoke to a friend who mentioned Picasso’s sculptures. I’d not really given them much though and I hunted them out to go have a proper look. They were a revelation, particularly the works hie made in cut and folded metal. They looked so alive in space, were so dynamic and the relationship with his painting was so evident. So for my tabletop forest I made the trees out of painted and folded card to explore the technique.

Another thing I like about Picasso’s sculptures is how often he used found materials and transformed them, sometimes just by placing objects together with very little alteration, such as the famous bull’s head made from nothing more than a bicycle seat and handlebars, now in the Picasso museum in Paris. He freed himself from being intimidated by making sculpture and working in 3D by using anything that he found around him; cut up tin cans, cardboard, wire and plaster, and he used space as an integral part of the object too. Just as in painting, where you don’t have to use the finest oil paints on meticulously prepared surfaces, in sculpture you don’t have to work away at unforgiving stone with special tools – you can just do it with what’s lying around and have some fun (although the finest oil paints and marble are fine and dandy too!).

Here are a few more images. I’m not in the office today and it’s still cold and grey outside so I might make a few more paper trees and maybe one or two creatures to inhabit the tabletop forest….

I’m very pleased to be involved in a new stage adaptation of Hansel and Gretel that will be touring  later this year. Kate Romano, of Goldfield Productions, has brought together a superb creative team to reimagine the well-known fairy tale with music, words, and multi-media staging.

With the text written by Simon Armitage, music composed by Matthew Kaner, visual supervision and direction by Clive Hicks-Jenkins,  shadow puppets by Peter Lloyd, and carved wood puppets by Jan Zalud, i’m joining one heck of a team! Filmmaker Peter Telfer will also be working with the artists on animation sequences and Caroline Clegg will be taking on the role of dramaturg.

Work is just beginning but there are some tantalising first images emerging this week including the following, a wonderful sketch by Clive for Jan’s puppet of Hansel:

And a shadow puppet by Peter Lloyd of Hansel and Gretel’s mother. The puppet will be animated for the performances:

For my part, i’ll be making model environments that will be appearing on stage and will also simultaneously be projected onto a big screen during performances.

My previous model making has been something of an amalgamation of dark fairy tale and German Expressionist aesthetics:

But this brand new Hansel and Gretel will be different. We’ll be exploring more contemporary terrain, reflecting the poetic reimagining of the story in Simon’s text and Peter’s music. Lots of experimenting to be done, but I’ve just started working with painted wooden blocks and simple tree shapes made from turned wood to literally construct ideas for environments and scenes from the storyline. I’m already very taken with this approach. Despite the simple and limited geometry of the blocks, they are proving very flexible and seem to have amazing transformative potential:

I’ll be posting a lot more about this project in the coming weeks, but for now, here are the performance dates and venues:

Touring dates (further information & ticket details to follow) 

• Cheltenham Festival WORLD PREMIERE  – 7th July 2018 
• Lichfield Festival ‘book at bedtime’ Lichfield Guildhall  – 13th July 2018
• Lichfield Festival matinee Lichfield Guildhall  – 14th July 2018
• Three Choirs Festival  – 29th July 2018
• Oxford Contemporary Music  – 14th September 2018
• Barbican Milton Court Concert Hall Schools Matinee – 12th October 2018
• Barbican Milton Court Concrt Hall – LONDON PREMIERE – 12th October 2018
• Canterbury Festival  Colyer -Fergusson Concert Hall  – 21st October 2018
• Bath Spa University  – Michael Tippett Centre – 24th October 2018
• Broadway Theatre (Letchworth)  – 4th November 2018
• Cambridge Music Festival – 23rd November 2018

Right, now to get making!

Before I put all the snippets of paper away to clear some space to do some other work I had a play this morning , snipping and assembling, putting together tiny landscapes, seeing what emerges from the marks. I could play like this all day, but very quickly I’m disappearing under a growing mound of paper and i eventually sweep them up and put them into a box so I can do something else and find the scissors/sketchbook/phone or whatever else has gotten buried!

When you don’t have much time this is a good way to very quickly play about with shapes. I sometimes work into the papers to create more definition and more explicit details such as windows and doors, but today it was just cutting and assembling the raw papers and letting the marks be themselves…