Port Hope is a lovely little town and home to one of the most industrious arts collectives I’ve ever met. Critical Art Mass has many innovative and interesting projects on the go. One of them was to update the town’s lantern walk and animate it with puppets and masks and glowing lanterns. They commissioned me to design parade pieces and head to Port Hope for six days of workshops to teach participants how to make the pieces. It was a really fun time - I met fantastic and creative people. Thank you Debbie Beattie for bringing me onto this project!
One of the people I met is the remarkable artist Dian Carlo. For my initial presentation I told the team we’d be making an 8-foot whale puppet. Later Dian approached me, telling me he’d like to work on that puppet, but he thought it would be great if it was bigger. The whale ended up 25-feet long. It was spectacular.