Monkey “automata” experiments and “victorian garden”

I don’t really have a “mathematical brain” or much patience… or much of an attention span… so trying to make automata has been really challenging for me but I really wanted to try it out… they are quite crude but I’ve (sort of ) made some basic automata experiments from cardboard. One of them animates a sewn (and painted) velvet marmoset stuffed with sawdust. I’m really wanting to use sawdust as a material, partly because I panic-bought some in a pet shop when feeling a bit lost, but also because I thought that sawdust kind of sits on the boundary between the “natural” and the “man made”. It comes from trees which once lived, and was often used in the Victorian period to stuff teddy bears, and also for stuffing taxidermy; therefore it also kind of sits somewhere between the living and the non-living.

Also I started making a “victorian garden” a week or so ago, and have been slowly continuing that… I’ve been thinking a lot about Victorian domesticism and the domesticisation of nature in creating gardens. I still haven’t finished it, I’m slowly working on it while I make other things… I’m not sure about it at the moment to be honest as I think it looks a bit twee…!