In honor of our first episode, we decided to ask an artist about what it takes to get started. What happens when you’ve got a blank page or an empty stage in front of you and you want to make something? We thought Johanna Winters could help answer that. She’s a visual artist and puppeteer, and an assistant professor at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design. We started with an empty pool. The Bryan Park pool, if you know Bloomington. In that otherwise empty pool was the strange character she’s created called The Protagonist. The protagonist is half papier-mâché and half human body – so far, it’s always been her own in there. She makes short films that are somehow both uncanny and tender as they explore things like longing and embarrassment and sensuality in an aging body.
We also talked about how she helps students explore materials and ideas, about aging and vulnerability, and how that led her to put on a puppet costume, and the documentary about two real living humans, a mother and a daughter, that started her puppet trajectory.
