We settled on creating a robot cat for our animal puppet and - borrowing some techniques from stop motion - a wire armature for the skeleton of it. This would form the basis of our puppet’s body and limbs, onto which we would then build up its robotic form.

Over the months of my DYCP, my mentors Elizabeth Johnson (Elizabeth Johnson Makes) and Cat Rock (House of Funny Noises), plus folk both at Puppet Place and in the wider puppetry community, kindly shared their insights and experience of fabricating puppets.

We devised a short story that would require a range of different puppets and mechanisms to be fabricated - with the idea of enabling me to explore a wide range of techniques and approaches.

One question that all of my mentors, Cat Rock (House of Funny Noises), Chris Pirie (Green Ginger), and Elizabeth Johnson (Elizabeth Johnson Makes), posed in some form or another across my DYCP was, “Why puppets?”

Thanks to Cat Rock (House of Funny Noises) and Chris Pirie (Green Ginger), I’ve been introduced to the fundamentals of and had opportunity to explore puppetry through workshops and ongoing conversations as part of my DYCP.

Puppetry has always fascinated and delighted me. And this opportunity to develop my creative practice, made possible thanks to public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England, enables me to explore new avenues of collaboration and expression, as well as improve my existing writing and creative practice.