our project: makers and masters
Meet the puppeteers turning make-believe into reality.
I first became acquainted with Hamish Fletcher and Tamara Rewse through a giant cockroach. It was on stage at Southbank Theatre in Melbourne/Naarm, all beady-eyed and shiny-shelled. This wasn’t a real roach that’d been terrifyingly enlarged, but for a sheer moment, it held the room’s wonder, laughter and squeamishness in its sizeable antennae.
The cockroach was a puppet, and Hamish and Tamara were its makers. The professional puppeteers have made a living bringing things to life. Especially things of foam and wood – which is what their joint puppeteering business is called. “We take things of foam and wood – just stuff – and make them into people’s dreams or visions,” Tamara says. “We reinterpret that into something beautiful or odd.”
On the surface, the pair make puppets for touring companies, television commercials and miscellaneous creative projects. Dig a little deeper and you’ll see they’re designers, makers, engineers, artists and troubleshooters, all rolled into one.
They’ve made a sweet alien baby for Brisbane/Magandjin indie-pop trio Sheppard’s “Daylight” music video. They’ve made an anthropomorphised sculptural torso for comedian Emma Holland’s Fine Art show. “The penis came to life and pointed to things in the room. The belly button talked and the nipples were eyeballs,” Tamara says.
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Hamish came to puppetry after a particularly creative childhood spent performing through acting and circus, which collided with his main medium of sculpture. “Puppetry was this natural conjunction of performance and sculpting,” he says. Tamara, meanwhile, was always an “obsessive crafter”. At university, there was a mask-making and puppetry class that seized her interest. “I was like, ‘This is it; this is the bringing together of making and performance.’ … The beautiful thing about puppetry is you’re performing and you’re seen, but you’re not at the fore.” Hamish adds: “The perfect art form for the socially awkward.”
Hamish and Tamara met in 2004 while completing the Victorian College of the Arts’ postgraduate diploma of puppetry. Fellow student Sam Routledge had an idea for a skit called Men of Steel (“cookie cutters – they were the ‘men of steel’,” Tamara remarks). The trio turned the concept into an award-winning show that toured globally for about a decade.
After establishing puppetry careers both together and separately, Hamish and Tamara became co-artistic directors of Things of Foam and Wood in 2010. Based in Victoria’s regional town of Kyneton, on Taungurung Country, being full-time puppeteers consists of a lot of playing and problem-solving. People come to them with ideas which, according to Hamish, sometimes look like “vague concepts”, “scribbled drawings” or “a thousand photos that someone’s fed into Midjourney,” an AI platform. It’s then their job to figure out what’s possible to make and what’s not.
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As with most creative jobs, every week looks different. But not many people can say that they go from mornings spent budgeting, project managing and quoting to afternoons spent making maggots (that’s Tamara) and working on puppetry voice modulation (that’s Hamish). The pair do hire a handful of freelancers every year, who range from ceramicists to carpenters. “We’re mostly employing regional people,” Tamara says. “It’s exciting that we’re able to facilitate that and support that and develop the skills of our local community.”
One of Things of Foam and Wood’s biggest ongoing projects is Bluey’s Big Play, a stage production of the beloved children’s show. Over the last five years, Hamish and Tamara have created and recreated larger-than-life reproductions of the Heeler family. “It’s been a real privilege,” Hamish says. “We’ve had a few goes at the same puppets, which is really rare.”
The Bluey puppets are energetic and pliable; like their onscreen counterparts, they run, play and dance. “We’re performers,” Tamara says. “We understand what it’s like to be touring a show and performing it 100 times … Puppetry is so awkward as a performance art. Those Bluey puppets are huge and really heavy, and we’ve made them as light as possible.”
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The magic – and difficulty – comes from making puppets that can perform. “It’s easy to create something beautiful, right? But to make something that has life and can move and work with a performer, that’s our speciality,” Tamara says. Repairs are inevitable; they’re part of the job. “Nothing can last. Entropy is way too powerful,” Hamish says. “You just can’t make anything bulletproof enough to last the rigours of touring, because people become superhuman on stage. It's amazing how strong people get and how much energy they can throw things around with.”
The beauty (and horror) of the internet age is that nothing is all that surprising anymore. Pixels can easily spit out otherworldly images. Influxes of AI-generated gunk can clog our imagination. Puppets, on the other hand, are singularly wonderful. “I think that the real world is quite shocking to some people. People are so used to such fantastical imagery on the screen that when you see something that doesn’t align with your expectation of the real world, it’s so refreshing,” Hamish says.
“Behind the puppet is a human. It’s someone breathing. You can feel that human’s energy with the puppet,” Tamara says. “For that moment, you’re there believing something.”
Hamish describes it as the suspension of disbelief. “It’s such a release. I think it comes back to play. It’s not real but it’s so wonderful to indulge in believing in it.”
This story comes straight from the pages of issue 128. To get your mitts on a copy, swing past the frankie shop, subscribe or visit one of our lovely stockists.