Niki
Ulehla: Making Dead Things Dance Jeweler, Puppeteer & Artist

Niki Ulehla, hunched over in her San Francisco studio, building tiny gods and demons with her hands.

She does something that would’ve made sense to the craftsmen who carved gargoyles 200 feet up the side of a cathedral that nobody would ever see. Or the women who stitched prayers into quilts in rooms nobody would ever sit in. She studied painting at Stanford, fine, whatever, good for her, but then she went to Prague to learn puppet-making, which is like saying: “Fuck your MFA, fuck your gallery, I’m going to learn how to make inanimate objects tell the truth. I’m going to learn it from people who never forgot how.”

Two decades. Two decades. That’s not a career, that’s a life sentence you choose because you can’t fucking do anything else, because the alternative is some slow death by committee, some long sad fade in a job that wants your hours but not your soul. Somewhere in her wiring she needs to take gold and wood and wire and trash, literal trash from the San Francisco dump, the stuff the rest of us throw out and never think about again, and turn it into Dante’s Inferno. Into something that moves. Into something that shouldn’t be alive but goddamn well is, kicking and twitching and grieving, when she pulls those strings.

I know. I shot the video. Multiple all nighters, the kind of nights where 3 a.m. stops meaning anything and 4 a.m. doesn’t mean anything either and you’re just two people and Sharka in a pool of work light arguing about whether a marionette’s hand reads on camera, whether the gesture lands, whether the dead are dead enough. I recorded the sound for that piece too. Crouched on the floor capturing footsteps, the small mechanical hush of a rolling wheel, scheduling the whole circus around her aikido class. Because of course she does aikido…

When she needed the sound of an incoming train, I stood next to the Caltrain tracks at 12:33am with my Zoom recorder waiting for the nightly freight that runs north to San Francisco. Because no stock library recording was going to capture it, she needed that train, a real one, the low iron groan of something enormous coming toward you in the dark, the kind of sound that gets into your sternum and stays there. That’s what working next to Niki is like. You think you’re helping and then you realize you’ve been conscripted, drafted, enlisted into the higher standard, the one where a stock train sound is an insult to the work.

The marionette is the perfect medium for our age, you know? It is. We’re all dancing on strings we can’t quite see. Performing little shows for lovers and friends we’re not sure exist. Mouthing lines we didn’t write for reasons we can’t remember. But in Niki’s hands those strings become visible, honest, acknowledged, almost holy. Her puppets don’t pretend to be anything other than what they are: constructions, artifice, theater, wood and wire and intention. 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 of their one short life.

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 and how we see it and maybe even who we are while we’re looking. Both require that obsessive attention to detail, that willingness to spend hours, days, weeks on something small that only a few people will ever fully appreciate, and to do it anyway, to do it because.

Niki Ulehla’s Inferno at Recology in Motion

We helped start the first Franconia Performance Salon together, and I mention this not to plant my flag in her story but because you learn a person by what they say yes to. Niki said yes to a half-baked idea about getting weird artists into the same room for one night, and then she did the thing she always does, the thing she cannot help but do. She showed up with something finished. Something that worked. Something that made the rest of us look like we were still figuring out which end of the hammer to hold, still warming up, still talking about the work we were going to make someday when the conditions were right.

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 drunk anxious dandy poets trying to impress their mother. The work is in the studio, alone, at hours when sensible people are asleep, making something that didn’t exist before, making it right, making it sing, making it true.

Niki Ulehla is an artist, jewelry designer, puppet maker, and performer. This amazing work is all hand made in her San Francisco studio.