Laura Hopkinson: Puppets in Lockdown

Laura Harris

In the first of a two-part series, Laura Harris enters ‘LauraHopkinsonWorld’ – a dimension dominated by whimsy and the ‘nonsensical’ antics of a pantheon of puppets. The artist will present new work at PAPER in Manchester in 2021, alongside artist Lisa Denyer, in a joint exhibition co-curated by Harris.

Part I

My research for this article was somewhat thwarted by the simplicity of Laura Hopkinson’s ‘About’ page: ‘Welcome to this nonsensical world’, is all it says. This is, in actual fact, as good an introduction as any to the Manchester-based artist whose work plays in the aesthetics and world-building fantasies of kids’ TV – an industry she is also part of – and which has a healthy disregard for sense and boring logics. The brevity and strange coolness of the welcome to ‘LauraHopkinsonWorld’ is fitting: ‘make of this all what you will’, she seems to continually dare her audience.

Since graduating from Manchester School of Art in 2015, Laura has made the transition to Media City, where she is art director for a children’s BBC programme. In a clear spill-over from her professional life, in her artworks she crafts bright and fluffy hand-puppet characters. This puppet pantheon, which springs from her Bolton studio, includes Box Head, Spikey Blancmange, Quints, Sam Onion, Razzo.

Sharing the screen with her creations, Laura herself provides a cool antidote to the ‘nonsensical’ antics of the puppets. If she breathes life into her characters, it is with a laughing breath – she prefers to see them as having lives of their own. It seems too clinical to call Laura’s short films a ‘practice’. Perhaps it is closer to a friendship between an artist and the things of her creation.

The characters’ recent zany high-jinks, broadcast on Laura’s Instagram (@LauraHopkinsonWorld), include cutting the lawn with scissors, creative uses of rice cakes, and playing a wooden-spoon-as-wind-instrument. Box Head, sniffing a burgeoning market, even recently brought out their own ‘Handy Hands’ hand-sanitiser, which ‘feels naturally like thick water’ (Not On Sale Now). It’s all playful, very playful, and doggedly whimsical.

Her videos and their characters send ripples through my cultural memory. Like Saturday mornings in childhood, sneaking downstairs with my sister to watch cartoons (Sesame Street) before our parents got up. My mid-teens, when my friends and I watched, repeated, and memorised Shooting Stars ad nauseum. University, where I hazily watched the surreal Mighty Boosh and it seemed to make a lot of sense, actually. The eternal pleasure of the Brian Butterfield Diet Plan (Butterfield, 2007). Laura’s work has a millennial penchant for absurd comedy, served cold.  

Having been paired with Laura for a project at PAPER Gallery, I looked forward to meeting the artist behind the mask and interviewing her for this article. But our first meeting was cancelled due to illness. We rearranged, but Coronavirus had crept its way to our homes up north by then and we decided it wasn’t prudent to meet in person. I watched some of her films again, on my phone, sipping Coke through a straw. They made me want to go and play on some swings, but my local park is closed for sanitary reasons.

We met online, as is de rigueur. I was wildly late, and my connection glitched any attempt at conversation into a thousand colourful squares. How zeitgeisty, I thought, nodding thoughtfully to myself. How meaningful. It was early in the pandemic.

A while later, Laura wrote to me: ‘My work is so busy at the mo that I’ve pretty much avoided anything practice-wise due to being so tired’. I understood.

Some artists during Lockdown have used their art practice as respite, while others have found themselves too busy or anxious to create. Laura’s work is particularly high energy – it’s not the type of art that could be called meditative. I have a vision of Laura conjuring up her characters in a kind of Dionysian frenzy; tuffs of orange fur flying, and Laura, with a final flourish, administering a pair of trademark round glasses. It’s not a ‘tired’ energy.

What sense did it make to press Laura into talking about her work right now? And how could I be sensitive, while still meeting editorial deadlines? It follows: what sense did it make to write about Laura’s work as if this pandemic wasn’t happening, as if Laura, her work, and my writing stood outside of the present in a clinical ‘art writing’ dimension?

Further, Laura’s work doesn’t lend itself to a usual artists’ interview. It felt bruising to try and tease out the theoretical fine-points of ‘the work’ (‘What does ‘play’ mean to you?’); laughable to make Spikey Blancmange, Quints or Sam Onion speak International Art English. No writer wants to be a party pooper, God forbid.

I invited Laura to spend a week jotting down her feelings about her creativity under Lockdown, letting me know what she was up to in any way she saw fit. Her response, ‘Puppets in Lockdown’, slid into my inbox like a present. The text and images gave a peep into her world, as did her Instagram, which she’d returned to with zeal. I saw that Box Head had taken up jogging, for example. Spikey Blancmange cut the lawn. Laura herself spoke of the difficulty of not having access to her studio. Like all that I’ve seen of Laura, ‘Puppets in Lockdown’ was a cocktail of characters and creator, the dividing line somewhat frayed.

There’s a moment, I find, in every piece of writing when the way forward opens up like a clearing in the woods. It becomes clear how you will walk through your write-up of a person, topic or place. In writing this piece I had no such epiphany, nor any desire to follow a path anyway.

I accepted the invitation of Laura’s work to play, to throw away the structures and strictures of sense. And yet, I wanted to capture the collision between boring, everyday logic and the frizzy, tangled territory of Laura’s creations. I took her words, and I set them loose.

Part II

Why don’t we start with you telling me a little bit about yourself? Who are you?

An adult human.

Of course, of course. Anything else?

A box-headed human.

Yes, yes. I can see that.

[Looks, nods]

How do you see yourself?

I’m just an onlooker living with them.

Oh. Living with who?

My characters.

[Pause]

Are these characters that you’ve made?

I don’t see them fully as something I have ‘made’.

So, if you haven’t made them, what are they to you?

A lot of my ideas at the moment seem to be coming directly from the characters rather than me.

Right.

[Pause, thinks]

These characters… are they… real?

They aren’t really in this world.

[Nods]

Do they speak to you? What do they say?

Next week’s live stream will have seven singing garden peas.

[Checks stream: seven singing garden peas. Nods]

I see. These characters, what do they do?

Box Head tried to do the 5k run for heroes.

Right.

Spikey Blancmange attempted to cut the grass with a pair of scissors.

OK.

Box Head brought out their own Hand Sanitiser.

How are you?

The first few weeks of Lockdown I have felt at a bit of a loss. I feel like my mindset is shifting a little.

And have your characters changed during Lockdown?

They seem to be slightly more involved with my usual daily things.

And before? What kinds of things did you do together?

The last public visit with Box Head was to Crosby Beach. This wasn’t too long before the Lockdown. There were loads of people there, but it only felt semi-wrong being out.

[Notes down: ‘semi-wrong’]

Tell me more about what that day was like?

There was a weird vibe around the place. I knew this would be the last time I would go out away from my home area for a long time. Lots of people took photos of me as Box Head that day. Maybe they still think about it as their last day out before Lockdown, when they saw an odd, box-headed human.

And… What do you think about when you think of this day out?

I think the world needs that bit of nonsense.

Yes, yes. More about you – non-Box-Headed you. What do you like?

Can of bugs, hot paint attached.

Can of b… OK.

[Pause, thinks, nods]

And about your art? What is it you make?

Escapism, trance, play, thought-provoking confusion, amusement.

What inspires you?

Popular culture, Amazon reviews, current affairs, aluminium foil trays, television and risk assessments.

How do you make your art works?

I enter a state of play.

What’s that like?

It’s very much like an only-child playing.

What do you play with?

A simple A4 printer paper. My puppets here at home. My camera and microphone.

OK, great. Now moving on… I –

I’m in isolation.

Well, yes, aren’t we all…

Everything seems so much different.

Yes. It does.

[Long meaningful pause, bites lip]

It is still nonsense and daft.

[Nods, emphatically].

***

A joint exhibition of new work by Laura Hopkinson and fellow artist Lisa Denyer will show at PAPER in Manchester in 2021, curated by Laura Harris. All images courtesy of the artist.