Wrinkle Cream vs The MiddleEast Crisis (as illustrated with poppets), Part I

If you’re looking for the Luck’s Dancer and Poppet sale page, it’s here: Luck's Dancer

But you're welcomed to stay for the sermon...

I’m getting lots of questions about the Little Red Poppets. I’m fairly certain the following answers them all, so far.

Why poppets and not puppets?

Because lots of people insisted and persisted to call them poppets, even when I insisted and persisted to call them puppets. Ok. I caved. Still, it will help distinguish them from other puppets I make.

What they were:
Originally, the little poppets were pawns in a chess set I worked on several years ago. I decided it was the wrong time to make a chess set, and possibly the wrong universe, so I put the project aside.

I made a few for myself, and kept looking at them and listening. I began to like having them here and there, and took to leaving one or two around when visiting friends, who would call days or weeks or much later when they’d discovered them, more delighted than I would have expected.

Alone, or in little groups here and there, they invaded our spaces at home and in the studio. For me, the little poppet has come to represent that distinct and singular moment of waking. I’ve experienced it and watched it in others, as when children grasp concepts for the first time.

Sometimes this moment is joyful. Sometimes it is crushing. It is its own dichotomy, this little poppet thinking for itself. It’s an old story.

I incorporated the poppets into larger works. Lots of them. You can see several of these on the gallery page. One particular piece, Shift, (for which I must find an image for you) has 843 of the little fellows...

When I put the poppets into settings, as pieces of larger works, they become something else, though they still themselves represent a moment of realization (sometimes it’s a moment of realizing they’re in the soup!)

I find myself using them as a sort of language, stringing rows of them together like some strange alphabet.

Or pieces of a puzzle. This means something to me. Exactly what that is still unfinished and unclear.

But the search…..the search is its own engine. And my favorite playground.

I’m not done yet with poppets. I’m still working on what they are.

What they will be, I don’t know. But my favorite possibilities include many thousands of them, and movement.
At any rate, for the moment, they are mostly about paying attention.


That said, I wonder now if I could’ve said it just as well with the image below.