Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy day of love to YOU, my online friends!  If it weren't for your encouragement, participation, and feedback, my art and my experience with it would not be the same at all.  To be honest, I don't know if the Dust Bunnies would have ever gotten to this point without the attention paid to me by people online. So, thank you, and happy hearts day!

xoxo
Amanda

What are Dust Bunnies?

This guy doesn't want you to touch his candy and tooth pile.

On several occasions recently, I've found myself in the position of really exploring what makes my characters who they are, as a whole  (What are they? What do they do? How do they feel? Do they feel at all?) ...and I thought it would be a good exercise to try and loosely "define" what makes the Dust Bunnies, the Dust Bunnies.  Of course they exist only in the realm of puppets, sculpture, and drawings, but even inanimate objects have a story behind them, and this is what I imagine the character sketch is like.

So if you've ever wondered just what the heck my intentions are with these creatures from my imagination, here you go.


First and foremost, Dust Bunnies are not very bright. If they manage to do anything clever or helpful, it's usually either dumb luck, coincidence, or fate.  Some of them can draw or read (badly), but that is like genius level for them. 

Dust Bunnies are innocent. They are never mean or spiteful. They can get annoyed and super cranky, and may throw tantrums (if you take food/lint/bottle caps away from them), but would never be violent - it's just not in their mental wiring to be mean.

Dust Bunnies are curious about everything. Buttons, boxes, your shoelaces, flowers, used toothpicks, dead bugs, cereal crumbs on the kitchen floor - it's all interesting, and all potential fodder for their habit of integrating their surroundings into their lives. They collect bits and bobs like magpies do, and often adorn themselves in clothing scraps and whatever they've found, mimicking what they see around them. 

They can grunt, sniffle, and mumble, but rarely use actual words. Sometimes they mimic, but don't necessarily know the meanings of the words they say.

They are always hungry.  Always.

If they were actually alive and you kept them as pets, they would utterly destroy your house. You'd be better off with a family of raccoons.

They make the best of what they have. They have no concept of jealousy or pride. A hat made out of a handkerchief and an old key is every bit as beautiful as a beat-up party hat with a fork tied to it. They don't know they are strange-looking. They exist almost entirely in the present moment. 

They don't really get hurt...mostly because I can't bear the thought of it. I think of them like animate bags of flour; they sort of plop and bounce, or tip over, but nothing harms them.


It kind of makes me wonder, too, why I imagine them being this way. I think in a lot of ways, I'm creating objects that are inherently sympathetic, and are designed to coax empathy out of the viewer. I'm an intensely empathetic person (often to my own detriment), and I often have a hard time understanding how a lot of people seem to lack that trait. Perhaps these little lost-looking creatures are an attempt on my part to ignite feelings of empathy and care - you want to take care of them, because they are small, vulnerable, and confused.

Wait. What!?

I like the fact that their faces show very little emotion. They aren't totally blank canvases at all - their emotions are just subtle. There's a lot of difference between them, if you really look. Some look  impish, some look like they just did something you will NOT approve of. Some look confused, while others look a little startled or sad.  But all of these things can be interpreted different ways, and I want the viewer who sees them to sort of use them as a reflector for their own emotional experiences.

I've always been a bit of a misfit. It was hard fitting in when I was growing up (I still have a hard time feeling like I'm fitting in, honestly). I liked art, science, fantasy books, and always thought the villains looked WAY cooler than the good guys, in pretty much everything. I wore head-to-toe costumes around the neighborhood and when I got older, dressed in a dark "alternative" fashion. I was the archetype of the "weird kid", but I wasn't rebellious or crass or mean. I just liked what I liked. I think these creatures are kind of autobiographical in a way - they don't do what they do for the satisfaction of others around them, they just like to wear paperclips, or chew on table legs, or wrap themselves in old grocery store receipts like a coat. They are weird because they just are, and though others would see it as creepy or strange, they revel in the fabulous things we discard.

Hanging out in a child's tea set.

I am, at my core, an idealist. I want to see the world as a fascinating, new place, full of possibilities, every day.  It's not always possible to do that, but I think my Dust Bunnies can.  Sure, they don't have arms and have sawdust for brains, but they're able to take in the world in wide-eyed wonder, one moment at a time without worry of the future, and act on their creative impulses in a way that I only wish I could a lot of the time. They're bumbling, imperfect, dirty, and strange, but they deserve to be loved and understood, just like we all do.

Origin Stories: Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

It's pretty amazing how things can be major influences on who you are, and you don't even really think about it. I do sometimes think about what influenced me to not only do what I do, but to make specifically the things that I make. I feel like the art that I create is this kind of chimera made up of different pieces of all the things that have touched me creatively throughout my life.  In this post though, I want to talk about the earliest ones - which are, I believe, also the deepest ones, as they were connections made in the honesty of childhood.

I was born in 1980. I actually feel pretty lucky about when I was born - I'm young enough for computing and network technology to have been a part of my pre-adult life (we got internet when I was in middle school, and my dad was always into computers) enough that I feel proficient using it, but I'm old enough that it wasn't a part of my childhood at all. We didn't have cable TV either, until I was about 8, so my entertainment when I was a child was books, VHS tapes, and whatever came onto the TV across the airwaves.  And I feel so lucky to have been a kid when I was, because those shows and movies, without the aid of computer imaging, relied on practical effects, handmade props, and puppets. So many puppets.

A lot of this nostalgia that I'm having today came from hearing that some original props and puppets from Mr. Roger's Neighborhood have gone up on display in Pittsburgh. And that got me to reminiscing (and searching Youtube) about the show, and just being flooded with memories about it that I didn't even know I had.  I must have watched hundreds upon hundreds of episodes of that show when I was little. To modern viewers, I'll admit it must seem really weird and awkward, and possibly even a bit uncomfortable to watch, with Fred Rogers' almost tranquilized, hypnotic speech, and the glacial pacing. But that show was probably one of my earliest television memories, along with Sesame Street, and both featured imaginative characters, puppetry, and adults interacting with kids in an honest, respectful, and non-condescending way. There's a total authenticity about it that I think is something I still strive for in my life and work as an adult. If you go back and look at the puppets in The Land of Make Believe, they are so ratty! They're dirty and worn, and very little effort was made to make them look "real". Because they didn't have to look real - they were real because you believed they were real, and wanted them to be. So they were.

Daniel Striped Tiger. Psychological stand-in for the anxious and emotionally sensitive.

I think more than anything, that search for authenticity is what stuck with me the most in my journey into adulthood. I know that "authenticity" is kind of a buzzword these days, and about as inauthentic as you can get, but I do mean it very sincerely. I'm a very emotional person, and I always have been. I know from talking to my mom that I had some troubles coping, emotionally and socially, when I was little. Shows like Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was so important, and I suspect this was true for so many other kids, too, because it was a predictable, quiet world, with a small cast of characters and an authority figure whom you actually believed cared about you.

It's funny that until very recently, if you'd asked me about this show, I'd say "oh yeah, I watched it, it was on TV all the time, remember the episode where he showed how they made crayons?", but the truth is, I think a lot of it stuck, more than I realized. I remember when he talked about death, using a dead fish in his tank as an object lesson. He talked about divorce and body parts and being punished by your parents...all the stuff that was really hard to talk about when you are little. And the puppets like Daniel Tiger - there was an episode where he was scared to go to school because he didn't know his letters and numbers yet, and was flat-out refusing to go. It seems so minor as an adult, but little things create very big and real fears when you're a kid, and I think I was able to turn the tables a bit by rooting for Daniel, not even realizing that he was representing fears and insecurities that I had myself.

I don't know that I can say my Dust Bunnies do the same work as the residents of the Neighborhood of Make Believe. They're not very animate, and their emotional states are usually in the range of "afraid", "uncertain", "spooked", or "excited".  But I like to think that people can insert their own feelings into the narrative, and project emotions onto them. I actually want people to project onto them, because I rarely make them with any specific emotions in mind. If you see an object that you connect to - a painting of a sad looking dog, a figurine of a fat bird, the tiniest grape you've ever seen - and you project emotions onto that thing, you are, in a small way, doing a little bit of psychological work on yourself. You're letting your own thoughts and experiences dictate a "life" that has never existed, and you are telling a story. You're becoming a narrator, even if it is for one or two seconds.

I want to create characters who may or may not have concrete stories attached to them, because I want others to add to the narrative, and become co-writers with me. It may not appear like this on the surface, but deep down I want everything I make to be as meaningful to somebody as Daniel Tiger, Henrietta Pussycat, and X the Owl were to me.

Depression is a Real Thing and I struggle with it

I don't often get terribly personal in my posts here, but today I'm going to.  It seems like the universe has converged somehow, and a number of people I respect (both famous and not-so-famous) have been talking about dealing with this kind of thing, and it made me want to add my voice.

Also, I totally understand that this kind of stuff isn't interesting to everybody, so I'll put a cute picture here the rest of it behind a jump cut. Click below if you'd like to continue!