Years ago, when I moved around a lot, in large part due to my studies, I got into the habit of leaving little marionette’s behind with dear friends and lovers. I regarded them as self-portraits of some sort. This particular one, probably the most involved of them, was made for a girl that I was very much in love with, who was studying fashion design. The idea was that it would be a collaboration and that she would eventually fashion a suit of clothes for him. He was created to be anatomically accurate in terms of proportion and attributes, and included such fetishistic details as my own hair.  Like so many of my projects, it took on a life of its own and became more involved than I anticipated.

I created an articulated skeleton for him out of heavy gage wire, proportioned according to a figure of 7.5 heads in height, with the loops at the joints bent in such a way to articulate much like the human body. I then sculpted the body and limbs from polymer clay. It was made around the summer of 2003. I remember it taking longer than I wanted it to. I’m not sure if he ever got clothes.

16 inches tall, Polymer Clay, Wire, Hair, Mono-filament.