Gabrielle takes one of her possum puppets out for a test run in Bouddi National Park.
GABRIELLE PAANANEN WORDS JENNIFER ENNION
imitating life
Gabrielle Paananen is passionate about breathing life into inanimate materials using the universal language of puppetry to engage people and tell a story. When you think of puppets is it Punch and Judy puppets that come to mind or Jim Henson’s much-loved Muppets? For a while, puppetry became overshadowed by the unlimited possibilities of CGI in movies. While animation thrived on screen, it took new puppets like the equine hero in War Horse to bring their souls back to the theatre, turning ‘new puppetry’ into latter-day stars. That expertise then found its way into movies in a hybrid of new technology and traditional puppeteering that allowed character animation for movies to be created in minutes instead of days. But Gabrielle Paananen wouldn’t have been able to comprehend or predict any of this when she first fell in love with puppets at the age of six. ‘I’ve always just made creatures out of things; things I found in the op shop,’ Gabrielle, now 23, says.
28 COAST
