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:Â 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.
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: Gemma Khawaja’s version of The Bone Lace Weaver To get experimenting with test scenes using my quickly made prototype puppets, I painted a backdrop of the interior of the lacemaker’s house in order to try out some of the dialogue written by Ulysses Black. He has gone for rhyming verse to reflect a fairytale …
Above: Gemma Khawaja’s version of Needlepin, a lace tell. The Lacemaking Tells are unaccompanied counting songs and rhymes sung/chanted by young lacemakers, particularly used in the lace schools, when they are first being taught to make lace. These songs tended to be made up of fragments of ballads, nursery rhymes and sometimes even hymns, and …
Above music: The Night Tangler theme by Gemma Khawaja. Old Bob (aka The Night Tangler) dwells in the gaps, or holes, in the lace. He represents chaos, disorder, lies, creative licence and the imagination. Here are some quick paper animations I did exploring the idea of Old Bob travelling through the gaps in the lace, …
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 …
Above: Music inspired by The Fox ballad, by Gemma Khawaja Above: A version of Long Lankin ballad, by Gemma Khawaja Songs sung by lacemakers (before lace became mechanised) tended to be very dark and macabre in tone. Lacemakers were mostly female (though there were some male lacemakers, though they are less common and this topic …