Inspired!

Joshua Anderson is a Maitland-based artist with a big love for shadow puppetry. We invited him to create a ‘fight’ scene in response to the exhibition Shadow Boxer.

I’m not a boxing fan, but I think the shadow puppetry form conveys well the duality of beauty and violence in the raw grit of a fight.

Why puppets?

I’ve been asked this simple question many times. Was it Sesame Street, Peter Pan, Play School, Hi-5 or the odd neon black light puppetry show that toured to my primary school in Year 2?

To be honest, I don’t know. What I do know is I love shadow puppets and puppetry more every single time I make, perform, or play with them.

Shadow puppetry is an ancient art form and one of the oldest storytelling methods: a performed transmission of beliefs and values. I believe shadows are the most accessible and universal expression of the human experience; everyone and everything, casts a shadow.

Shadows provide a place of respite from the sun; enabled sundials to function as the forefather to clocks; and are often used as sinister representations of danger. But they have an undeniable simplicity and natural beauty.

The shadow puppetry I have been exploring attempts to morph this ancient art form into multidisciplinary visual and performance-based artwork.

I combine colour produced by refracting light with the traditional method of obstructing light, to produce shadow-based imagery that draws more on visual techniques than performative expressions to portray emotion and drama.

Boxing scene created by Maitland-based shadow puppeter Joshua Anderson, 2021

Battles scenes and sword fights are common in the shadow puppetry tradition, especially in Asia. For this boxing scene, with simple cardboard cutouts of bodies in strike and defence positions, I added visual drama with the red of the gloves. I’m not a boxing fan, but I think the shadow puppetry form conveys well the duality of beauty and violence in the raw grit of a fight.

Joshua Anderson is based at the Maitland Space Project studio in the Levee and occasionally runs shadow puppetry workshops. He created ‘Shadow of the Day’, a creative installation of shadow puppetry in five shopfronts in Maitland, which changed each day for two weeks, for Maitland City Council’s Creative Streets ‘After Dark’ initiative in 2020. You can contact Joshua at anderpingson@hotmail.com