U N F L A T T E N I N G:
Re-membering with paper-maché
PROLOGUE
Once upon a time, my mind was a sheet of cardboard.
My mind was flat, and smooth, and plentiful. My thoughts were printed in carefully staged photos, logos, slogans, symbols of industry, lists of warnings, lists of ingredients. My experience folded into a rigid armor for food, gadgets, and other Things Of Value. My mind came from Nowhere, and returned to Nowhere, in a process called “Recycling.”
When I wanted the product inside, I would tear open my mind, then return it to its natural state of flatness. Over time, working and worrying it in my hands, my mind began to wear, flex, and unflatten. Guided by a force beyond logos and warnings, my hands were strung to huge Hands Of Clay below, known to worms and skeletons — and wild Hands Of Wind above, known to my skin, or your ears, or a great noise of wings up in the troposphere…
Thus the unflattened mind shuddered itself awake, cracking and curved as the eggshell of the wide world. By the world it was woven with tangled fibers of life, pressed from Taiga forests on every continent unflattened from single seeds whose roots wrenched minerals from soil, whose green flesh swallowed sunlight, whose tiny hands twisted starch into fibers still residing in Flattened Minds from Nowhere. But Nowhere didn’t exist! Whichever “we” we were — puppets or puppeteered — we found that our mind, when soaked in the river, was scribbled with as many crooked stories as the landscape was wrinkled with riverbeds.
WHY PUPPETRY?
Making large puppets from paper maché is a simple way to use many hands to unflatten the mind into curves echoed at every scale in nature, re-membering the shapes of life. Why? To march with them on the summer solstice in what’s left of our common spaces! To celebrate life and show the world back to itself, as human beings have always done! To praise what is left worth praising, and sing good grief for all that’s lost already! To be called absurd and childish by moneyed men who fear absurdity and children! To amplify words, voices and stories flattened by everyday boots of the Empire!
No matter the scale, puppetry is historically an artform of common people — a wild and vulgar thorn in the side of Empire. Across Europe, the violent mischief of Punch (England), Kaspar (Germany), Pulcinella (Italy) and Petroushka (Russia) echoed the widespread violence of monarchs and their minions against common people. The portable, powerful trickery of puppets worldwide has remained unflattenable for centuries — trivialized instead by powerful patriarchs (along with nursery rhymes, folktales, & other vestiges of old wisdom) as cheap entertainment for children and idiots. But over and over, prolific seeds of truthtelling sprout in places deemed undignified by the ones in power.
Bread and Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus, Vermont
I’ve worked since 2019 with Squallis Puppeteers here in Louisville, and since 2015 with the Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont. Founded by German immigrant Peter Schumann in NYC in 1964, Bread and Puppet developed a contagious aesthetic of absurdist political street theater which combined giant paper-maché with folk traditions such as clowning, parades, circus, and pageantry. Twenty-five years ago, a trip to Bread and Puppet’s “Domestic Resurrection Circus” helped inspire Nora Christensen to found Squallis; the company’s influence can also be seen in The Heart of the Beast (Minneapolis, MN), Paper Hand (North Carolina), Wise Fool (New Mexico), and Papel Machete (San Juan, Puerto Rico) — among many others worldwide.
UNFLAT EARTHEN MOLD
If you want to make something unflat with paper maché, you need an unflat form on which to layer it. One good way that works for any size puppet or mask is to collect clay from a riverside, creek bed, or your backyard. Kentucky has many deposits of rich clay, some of which have been heavily mined for industries like porcelain, bricks, or cat litter. Ask permission from the land before digging up clay. (Or if you buy it, remember: it doesn’t come from Nowhere.)
Scoop it onto a stable and messable work surface, like a table or board. (Working in the sun makes glue-drying much faster, but have extra plastic on hand to keep rain out!) You can save time and clay by bulking up the volume of the form from underneath: arrange and secure something solid (bales of straw, plastic or metal containers) into a skeletal shape of what you want, cover that with a wet towel for good purchase, then sculpt the clay on top.
Maybe you have a plan, or a drawing to work from. If not, trust the mind of your hands to re-member from the clay a forgotten face of this world residing in your bones: people with beaks, fins, wings, antennae… even human people!
Bend down and look at your form in a horizontal plane: moving upward from the table, it should only get narrower — i.e. no clay should expand wider than any below it. (Once it’s dry, the paper maché must be able to lift off without getting stuck by its own shape.) When you’re done sculpting, while the clay is still wet, cover the entire surface with a thin plastic like trash bags or saran wrap. Press it down flush with the wet clay surface so it stays moist underneath.
MAKING GLUE
You can buy glue made from animal hides or hooves, but most store bought glues contain an abundance of chemicals. You can cook an excellent glue with water and pulverized endosperm of industrial corn, AKA cornstarch. (You’ll need a stove, saucepan, spoon, and bowl.)
Paste recipe
For a thinner paste, use about a 1:8 ratio (2 tbsp. per cup) of cornstarch to water (thicker ratio: 1:5). Pour ~2/3 of the total water into the saucepan, and turn on the heat.
Meanwhile, save the remaining water in a bowl, and stir in the corn starch (no lumps!). When the saucepan boils, turn heat to low, and slowly pour in the liquid mixture as you stir. Keep stirring. As the mixture turns from white to translucent, turn off the heat and keep stirring. When it cools, you’re ready to…
PAPER MACHé: THE MORE HANDS, THE BETTER!
You (y’all) can use newspaper, brown bags, or almost any paper. The strongest plentiful paper comes from fully submerging scraps of 2 or 3-ply cardboard in a tub of warm water, peeling apart the layers, and using the thick flat pieces as your strips. (Don’t use the corrugation, it’s too flimsy!) This is good for the mind.
Whatever material you use, the most important thing is to tear (not cut) it into strips. The torn edge is crucial! You’ll use strips of all sizes, but two or three fingers wide is a good way to start. All strips should be soaked in water, squeezed & crumpled with the hands, then dipped in or slathered with glue so that they’re saturated but not dripping. Over the plastic on the mold, apply strips so they overlap. As needed, adjust strip sizes to the form, using narrow strips to turn strange corners or cover especially unflat zones. Smooth out edges often.
Cover with 4-7 layers of paper maché, allowing each layer to dry fully before starting the next. Sun power or box fans can speed up drying. When you’ve done enough layers and everything is dry, carefully pop the entire piece off of the mold. Feel the shape from both sides with your hands. Extra maché can be applied to weaker spots if needed. Speak to the paper in this unflattened form!
OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
All masks and puppets can be painted with old house paint, requiring no new materials from start to finish. All sizes will last longer if you line the perimeter with strong wire or unfolded coathanger, then apply paper maché to attach it. On large projects, add a long folded strip of cardboard to the whole edge, attaching it first with staples, then paper maché.
Reinforce protruding shapes (nose, etc.) from the inside with splints of bamboo or plastic tubing, secured with paper maché. See images for basic large character plan, for which you will also need hands. (There are so many shapes of hands!) One or two horizontal wooden braces (used as attachment points for the center pole) can be applied by screwing through the cardboard perimeter into the wood with a flattened bottle cap as a washer.
AND RE-MEMBER:
Your mind can’t be contained by a cardboard metaphor-it isn’t flat! It is shaped by everything it touches with tiny hands stretched out wider than the internet, deep into the liquid heart of the planet, and high among the lofty dreams of constellations.
Words and illustrations by Isaac Fosl-van Wyke