This is my latest creation, a new junk lady. I love making these characters, but they do take a while to finish. They're like little scrap books, constructed using lots of junk and found materials, with hand sculpted feet, hands and head. I made her for my friend Kamila, who is moving to Czech, to remind her of the uk (so all the junk is uk related).
I love to imagine these little goblins going around gardens and streets at night, collecting our thrown away discarded items, like little magpies. Anyone who's seen the movie Labyrinth will recognise the idea of a junk lady goblin, there's a great puppet in that movie, that lives on a junk heap. I've always loved that character from the movie, so combined the idea with childhood memories of "little people", I came up with these up-to-date fairytale creatures.
. There was always something evocative about stories about little people, such as The Borrowers or Man by Raymond Briggs. I also love the artist Slinkachu, who designs little people and hides them around London. I think this must be an archetypal ideas, because it seems to appear in culture across the world and throughout history. Every culture has little people, either good or bad, they symbolise vulnerability, fragility of nature and the mystery of our environments.
In the future I would love to build more of these, maybe ones from different areas; such as the beach or forest. Hopefully this would make people think about what exactly is being dumped and where, how our environment is becoming more and more defined by what we have left there and how much damage has been done. The whimsical fairies and elves of old, running through woodland, would most likely struggle to survive, and jusk like foxes or squirrels would probably have to adapt and urbanise.
