Maggie Winston
As an artist who usually performs for the public, the pandemic posed the challenge to use the camera. What a new and exciting world! With the assistance of my roommate, a studio full of puppets and projectors and access to the forest, I created a multi-layered video using finger puppets, masks, birch bark, and forgotten potatoes.
Birch Woman is about aliens, a woman who transforms into a birch tree...or tree creature/alien?...cellphones, parallel universes and dreams. It makes a statement about how the government's measures to social distance in order to protect the most vulnerable in our society is opposite to the ways in which trees connect their roots systems to save each other. How much are we like trees? How much are we completely different? Can we as humans learn something from them? Puppetry has the power to animate or personify that which is inanimate. In this video, I give a voice to the trees.
Artist Bio
Maggie Winston is a puppeteer, educator and community engaged artist. She is originally from Baltimore, MD, USA, has lived in Vancouver between 2007-2016 and is now based in Montreal, QC where she is currently studying contemporary puppet theatre at l’Université de Québec à Montréal. She engages community members through transformative creative projects that have an emphasis on inclusion and imagination. In Vancouver, Maggie facilitated numerous artist-in-residence projects with the Vancouver School Board, Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation, and ArtStarts-in-Schools, BC. She was awarded the Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award- Emerging Artist in Community Arts (2010). In Montreal, she is facilitating puppetry, storytelling, and other interdisciplinary projects in schools through the English Language Arts Network (ELAN).
As artistic director of Lost & Found Puppet Co., Maggie produces original performances for all ages. L&FPco. is dedicated to promoting the art of puppetry as a unique and valued art form everyone can experience. Productions are created through devised or creation based theatre processes, utilizing puppetry in many styles and other art practices. Themes such as family, cultural history, human relationships to objects, nature, and spirituality are the inspirations. There are stories about lost socks, giant junk monsters, larger-than-life invasive plant species, beaver dreams, and grandma’s memories in her recycled quilt.