The crocheted head of "Longing" the theatre puppet

The crocheted head of the theatre puppet called Longing continues the series of emotion mask characters (Fear, Rage & Sorrow) created and made 2016–2017. Designing and making the character masks and developing them further into theatre puppets is a part of my artistic, practice based research project called ‘Actor’s breath meets mask’: Rethinking living cultural tradition through craft practice in design for performance (see more: Oksanen, 2018). Seeing emotions as ‘living’ characters or creatures can be looked at as a process of verbalizing and visualizing the artist-researcher’s experiences of dealing with emotions in the contexts of human life, academia or theatre. The process of visualizing emotions as characters started from asking and answering questions like “does the Rage look like a mosquito?”, “does the Fear fear itself?” and “how much does the Sorrow cry?” The Longing is to be seen as a combining character bringing the Fear, the Rage and the Sorrow back together with their pairing emotions called Courage, Calmness and Joy. The last emotion planned to be made would be Confidence, proudly carrying all the other emotions well balanced in itself.