Niki Ulehla, hunched over in her San Francisco studio, building tiny gods and demons with her hands.
She’s does something that matters, something real, something that would’ve made sense to the craftsmen who carved gargoyles 200 feet up a cathedral nobody would ever see or the women who stitched prayers into quilts. She studied painting at Stanford, fine, whatever, but then she went to Prague to learn puppet-making, which is like saying “fuck your MFA, I’m going to learn how to make inanimate objects tell the truth.”
Two decades. That’s not a career, that’s a life sentence you choose because you can’t do anything else. Because somewhere in your wiring, you need to take gold and wood and wire and trash, literal trash from the San Francisco dump, and turn it into Dante’s Inferno. Into something that moves. Into something that shouldn’t be alive but goddamn well is when you pull those strings.
The marionette is the perfect medium for our age, you know? We’re all dancing on strings we can’t quite see, performing little shows for audiences we’re not sure exist. But in Niki’s hands, those strings become visible, honest, acknowledged. Her puppets don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are: constructions, artifice, theater. And in that honesty, they become more real than most of the humans stumbling around pretending they’re not performing every goddamn minute of every fucking day.
Jewelry and puppets, she makes both. Both are about adornment, about transformation, about putting something on the body or the stage that changes what we see. Both require that obsessive attention to detail, that willingness to spend hours on something small that only a few will ever fully appreciate.
This is the work. Not the gallery shows, not the park performances, not the artist statement that sounds like it was written by a committee of anxious poets. The work is in the studio, alone, making something that didn’t exist before, making it right, making it sing. Niki Ulehla is an artist, jewelry designer, puppet maker and performer. This amazing work is all hand made in her San Francisco studio.
