Fi Henshall
Automaton builder
Penryn, United Kingdom
Gears of glee
- Fi creates automata with reclaimed and found objects
- Her craft was born after she started adding mechanisms to her marionettes
- In 2017, she made a permanent installation for the Royal Pagoda at London Kew Gardens
Fi Henshall works and lives on two boats rafted up together, so that the living and working spaces are united, but separate. It is in her workshop, a historic barge on the Penryn River in Wales, that she makes her creative automata. "I was fascinated by the point at which creativity and engineering meet, and I loved the idea of making people smile with my work, so I taught myself how to carve marionettes," Fi says. One day, when she was carving some marionettes with elaborate controls, she added a mechanism to them, and her automata practice was born. Fi works exclusively with found and reclaimed materials. She is inspired by stories, people, humour and a host of imaginary characters she met during her childhood as a voracious reader. Many of Fi's pieces include miniature books and libraries, the author and title of which hold clues to the background of the piece.
INTERVIEW
As a child, I remember being captivated by the magic of the London Cabaret Mechanical Theatre’s automata. I also spent a lot of time in my father’s workshop. He used to fix everything, and I must have absorbed his interest in how to make things work using whatever bits are lying about.
Around 2008, I was making marionettes from carved wood and found objects. The controls I was creating were becoming increasingly elaborate, so a friend suggested that it would not take much more effort to turn them into mechanisms.
I have lived on sailing boats for a long time. Five years ago, when my kids were too old to take with me to work after school, I realised I needed a workshop close to our boat. The barge is huge and always needs a lot of work. It is a labour-intensive way to live, but it is also beautiful.
Found objects come with their own stories and history, either known or imagined, which shape and feed the pieces I use them in. There are so many beautiful, broken objects that hardly anyone still sees as useful, and I love giving them a new life as part of my creations.
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