Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.
Alexander Calder
So here I am, belly-down on the floor of a Dogpatch studio, camera in hand, staring into the wooden faces of two dead-eyed puppet boys who’ve seen things… Hansel and Hansel.
Niki Ulehla makes marionettes. Not the kind you remember from childhood, if you even remember them at all, but something else. Something that lives in that space between craft and obsession, between whimsy and the slightly sinister. Hansel and Hansel. Twins, but not identical. A mirror, but a funhouse mirror.
Here’s the thing about these boys: they don’t move right. Can’t. But that’s not a flaw. That’s who they are. Their awkwardness is their character. The hitch in their step, the way they can’t quite do what you’d expect, that’s not limitation, that’s definition.
I’m down here on the floor because that’s their world. You want to see what they see, you get down to their level. The studio smells like metal, wood and dust and the particular stillness of a space where someone makes things by hand, alone, for hours. You can feel the concentration that’s happened here, accumulated like sediment.
Originally they were meant for Humperdinck’s opera, that German fairy tale about children and witches and ovens. But they’ve moved beyond that now. They have their own story. Niki wrote it. Daniel Brown is in the process of scoring it. They’ve become something other than their origin story, which is maybe the best thing that can happen to any of us.
What these frames hold, is the strange dignity of objects made by human hands to represent human things. The uncanny valley of almost-alive. The devotion it takes to give a pair of wooden boys their own narrative, their own reason for being.
This is Niki’s work. Someone in a studio in the Dogpatch, making marionettes that don’t move quite right, and in that imperfection, finding truth.