Meet the smuggler and learn more about lace smuggling generally and his struggle with a corpse… Puppets, puppetry and voice by Daisy Jordan. Video editing by Ulysses Black. Music by Gemma Khawaja. Below: Earlier experiment with making a corpse prototype with a removable head: Below: Prototype dog rod marionette
Above music: Maiden Maiden by Gemma Khawaja. Lyrics by Ulysses Black. The little puppet prototype pictured is the character of the lace merchant. The lacemakers were commissioned to make lace by lace merchants or dealers. These merchants would order particular patterns or styles of lace and travelled from village to village, supplying the lacemakers with …
Above music: The Night Tangler theme by Gemma Khawaja. Above audio: Ulysses Black talks about our Night Tangler character More about our fictional folkloric character The Night Tangler… Here are some character sketches showing him crawling through gaps, collecting lacemakers’ eyes and spinning yarns into webs as thresholds – the veil beyond which lies the secret …
Above music: “Needle pin” by Gemma Khawaja. Based on lacemaking tells. Video animation below: The two propagandist characters capture Old Bob and pin him down.
(Videos below text) When I was researching lace folklore, one thing that I found really fascinating was the fact that a lot of the lace legends didn’t seem to surface until the nineteenth century – after the invention of machine made lace. There were many patrons of handmade lace (for example, the Catholic Church) and …
Above: One of our own original lace tells by musician Gemma Khawaja. Lyrics by Ulysses Black This is a paper prototype I made for the character of the Lace Mistress – in the lace schools, children as young as five would be taught to make lace by a teacher, who was often a woman with …
Above audio: Gemma Khawaja’s version of A Shirt of Lace Very quick animation experiment exploring the legend of the young lacemaker being visited by the Virgin Mary. Animation by Daisy Jordan, words/poem and film editing by Ulysses Black. Music by Gemma Khawaja.
Above: 3 versions of “The Lacemaker Theme” by Gemma Khawaja. Writer Ulysses Black and myself have been thinking up various narrative structures inspired by the research I have been doing into lacemaking history and folklore. Ulysses has been writing parts of scripts, poems and even his own lace tells based on motifs found in the …
Above: The Night Tangler theme by Gemma Khawaja (featuring rhyme by Ulysses Black) The Night Tangler is a folkloric character created by project writer Ulysses Black and myself. He was inspired by various motifs uncovered in my research into lace making folklore and history. Ulysses Black will be writing a blog post about him in …
I have been looking at archetypal characters which often appear as motifs in many of the legends and stories surrounding lace making. The Poor Lace Maker The archetype of the poor lacemaker appears in almost every aspect of lacemaking folklore and history. Lacemakers were, indeed, often very poor and made to work in bad conditions …