Fork­beard Fantasy

http://www.forkbeardfantasy.co.uk/

I went to see this exhib­i­tion at the Fest­iv­al Hall a little while ago. Fork­beard Fantasy are a group who create stage costumes and props, and make films and peep­show art install­a­tions. (I misspelled it as “Folk­beard Fantasy” when I was labelling the Flickr set, which kind of makes sense). There’s a strong theme of fantasy, humour and surreal­ism in all the work, and most of the things in the exhib­i­tion were for touch­ing and using rather than being locked away in glass cabin­ets.

Right near the door was this huge unicorn puppet from a theatre show. You could pull vari­ous cords and make it move very real­ist­ic­ally, although it needs two people for oper­a­tion.

There were some creepy costumes of rabbits …

… and crows.

This puppet was rigged up to sensors to start moving when people approached it. Stuff of night­mares.

I partic­u­larly liked this puppet of nerves.

They also had a lot of mini cinema diara­mas with a film play­ing at the back. You stuck your head under a curtain to see into the scene.

They had a char­ac­ter of a fake Michael Winner style direct­or explain­ing their films.

“Film comes in differ­ent sizes. It comes in 35mm, 16mm, 58mm .. The bigger the film, the bigger the direct­or”