Patricia O'Donovan

               



After more than 40 years of intensive touring and performing in the stages and theater festivals all over Israel and the world, I am focusing on two elements that were always part of my creative process as a performer of puppet and visual theater: the image and body gesture. Always blended into my work, not only in theater but in my studies and doctoral research in biology, I now extract drawing, paper cutting and co-speech gesturing ( which also convey meaning through iconic or metaphoric images) from the whole performative complex, to focus on each as a separate medium; researching, exploring and putting image and body back together both in the new way I now chose to communicate through performance with an audience, and for my teaching for which  the neuroscience of gestures gives me background knowledge for the exercises I create for my students. The visual language I once generated with the voice and movements from objects and the human and puppet bodies on stage, I now split between two spaces: the more restricted, peri-personal space of my storytelling body and the 2D space of a drawing or papercut  that accompanies my performance; meaning now results from converging what words and images that inter-'act ' in parallel 3D and a 2D spaces.

Drawing and papercutting: I begin by sketching in pencil on white paper, erasing and changing until I arrive at the image I want. I then transfer this image with white pencil onto black Bristol paper and then cut along them with a paper knife. The final result is a paper cutout, where light can pass through the empty areas allowing the image to be projected onto a screen or wall. When placed into a flat surface, a cutout looks more like a wood cut. The differences in technique are significant, mainly due to the thinness of the paper. Whereas in a lino or woodcut, painted areas can exist isolated, in a papercut they can't. Parts must be connected to avoid isolated bits from flying off. This affects the action of cutting itself, it is not a blind following of the white pencil lines, but instantaneous decisions must be taken on the spot in the act of cutting, to keep the work from falling apart, meaning that the knife must integrate connecting bridges cleverly into the final composition.   
My sources of inspiration come from the work of Clément Moreau, a  pupil of Käthe Kollwitz and friend of my parents, whose  black and white  wood and linocut prints filled my childhood home in Buenos Aires and present home in Jerusalem, and another source are  years of  building performing Shadow Theater.

At present a series of paper cuts I created for a story by Franz Kafka are exhibited at the National Library of Jerusalem. I am working a new series of papercuts for a story by Heinrich von Kleist, writing a critical study on one of his essays and teaching a course in Puppet Theater.  


For a full view of my work and CV click HERE.