About
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About *
CARROT
PATCH ✸
Artist Bio ✸
Carrot/Pax is a Bristol-based artist working with puppetry, painting & performance. Their work focuses on magic, animism and bringing dreams to life. They are interested in how an illustrative and symbolic visual language holds ideas throughout time.
As a puppeteer they believe in the life of all things (animism) and that the magic art of creation is not just a metaphor but an actual tool to create our own realities and reshape the world around us. As a hypnotherapist they are interested in the subconscious mind, and the trance state whilst creating artwork and developing their own personal visual symbologies. Their work as a community artist and workshop facilitator works to empower participants to use art as a tool to re-imagine worlds.
Through performances, community workshops and collaborations with artists across borders, their work seeks to speak to a collective unconscious through a visual language that supersedes speech, and that materialises the collective dream, to inspire and embolden audiences to imagine beyond the current reality.
Artist statement ✸
Carrot believes in the life of all things, the natural world, and anything made from it. Their interest in animating and giving character to non-humans can be seen throughout their work, formed from their connection to the forests where they were raised. They are interested in the dialectical aspect of materials: the dialogue between maker and material is an essential collaboration, creating work that is emergent and mysterious.
Their puppet shows with Beanpig puppets focus on abstract performances that are collaborations with the objects. The puppets were not designed, but asked to come into this world, and their performances are rituals of messages from the puppet/object realm. The interactions and relationships between puppet characters create emergent narratives through the puppets’ individual personalities. Puppet shows inspire suspended belief, and the possibility of new realities and transforming worlds. The puppets shapeshift and transform, demonstrating our own ability to transmutate reality around us.
Carrot believes in the power of art and creativity to demonstrate the connections between human and non-human, and the power to transform reality and society through creativity. They see their work not as decoration, but as a living spell to make change in ourselves and our world: externalising subconscious messages and creating dialogue with the non-human, showing cross-dimensional solidarity between planes of perception and existence.
They believe in accessible community art spaces as necessities for social transformation, and imagination as a vital tool for survival in a changing world. Inspired by mystery traditions and altered states, ritual and collective consciousness, they see visual art as a tool not only to inspire change, but to creatively change society. As a hypnotherapist, they create spaces to dream of a more liberated world and are passionate about empowering others to believe that it is possible.
As a workshop facilitator, they make these ideas practical, teaching trance techniques with the goal of sharing the capacity for transformation with larger collectives of people. Their illustrative artwork is inspired by Hermetic manuscripts, in which lay hidden clues to The Way. Similarly, their art seeks to map The Way to liberation through illustrative drawings.
Their puppet performances act as metaphors, demonstrating the power we have to make and move the world around us. But the magic of creation is not just a metaphor: it is an actual tool to create our own realities and reshape the world around us. Audiences learn the beauty of creation, that we have the power in our hands and bodies to join with the land and make the world we want to see, even if it starts as a thought or a cardboard puppet.
Projects ✸
BEANPIG PUPPETS
Artist, Puppeteer & Maker ✸ 2019–present
Delivering performances in various venues in the UK and internationally, alongside puppetry making workshops free in collaboration with Bristol Libraries & Refugee charities. My work as a puppetmaker has included being commissioned for film and also performing for film as well as stage. Performing everywhere from the National Portrait Gallery to the Castiellers OUF puppet festival in Montreal.
BRISTOL EXPERIMENTAL PUPPET FESTIVAL
Artistic Director & Producer ✸ Bristol ✸ 2026 ✸ Arts Council Supported
✸Founded and directed the Bristol Experimental Puppet Festival, 10 days, 42 sold out events at 3000 people engaged. Platforming experimental puppetry in Bristol with accessible events to a wide audience.
✸Responsible for artistic programming, artist liaison, production, event development and creating opportunities for audiences to encounter experimental puppetry in Bristol.
THE PEOPLE’S PUPPET OPERA
Participatory Puppetry & Performance workshop ✸ funded by the Emma Burke Newman Association 2026
Bringing puppetry making and performing opportunities to participants with no experience and less access to arts spaces. Through an application process, this free workshop challenged participants to make puppets and perform a show with them over a weekend, with intensive workshops, and direction from myself. The weekend was preceded by 10 community puppet making outreach workshops in communities around Bristol. And accumulated in a performance at the Cube Microplex in Bristol.
