We recently connected with Geahk Burchill and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Geahk, thanks for joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I don’t remember every wanting anything else. My first real job was as a door-to-door salesman at thirteen, which I managed to work 30-hours a week while in Middle School. This helped me talk to strangers and learn to tell stories.

At fifteen I started my first art business, by organizing my friends, all dreaming of drawing comics, into Youth Comix Group. I had an unofficial race with (the now well-known cartoonist) Ariel Schrag, who also attended Berkeley High, to see which of us could publish our comic before turning sixteen. Ariel won–by a lot. My first comics were made on a copy machine, hand-folded & stapled. I trucked them, by bus, to all the various Bay Area comic shops to sell them wholesale for $1.25, and when I calculated my earnings after a year of work, after printing costs and bus fare–not including the hours of drawing–I had made a demoralizing $4.72.

At seventeen I left Berkeley to live in Hollywood, California, where I immediately found myself homeless and living in squats. I did get two roles: an extra in Terminator 2: The Ride, and as a homeless teen in a PSA, but I earned most of my money as a muralist for LA County. I returned to Berkeley after two years and worked as a sign painter.

I’ve spent my life hovering between straight jobs as a carpenter, and side projects in theater, comics, and film, hovering on the edge of survival, but I never felt I had a choice except to pursue artmaking as a career.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I do a lot of different things so I’ll talk about the thing I’m most known for; marionette puppets. I see puppet theater as the ultimate gasamkunstwerk, an art that encompasses everything.

I met a muralist who invited me to her boyfriend’s birthday party. It was at an eclectic house in Berkeley, with theater-carpet floors, and antique dolls, and rusty-driftwood assemblage art, displayed around the second story apartment. Someone had loaned the party a video camera, and in those days, that was very rare. It seemed like an opportunity too good to pass up. Most of the guests were artists and, as you do, we began putting together an improv puppet show on the coffee table. That was my first introduction to marionette-building; all because of a video camera.

I have always considered myself a storyteller. Marionette theater seemed like the next evolution, from comics, to the third dimension. Live performance was exciting and building reusable sets and puppets seemed like an efficient use of materials. It was also highly collaborative and engaging. Most of all, it used so many of my skills and taught me many new ones,

In marionette theater you are writing stories, carving wooden puppets, sewing their clothes, engineering their joints, painting backdrops, building props, conceiving magic tricks, lighting sets, foleying audio, illustrating posters, marketing, manipulating the puppets and voice-acting, live in front of an audience. The puppeteers are collaborators with the audience as well. The performance changes, based on the ebb and flow of the audience. We are listening intently to gauge the pacing, pathos, comedy and terror of a given performance.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

The list of resources I wish I’d had while learning is endless. When I started there was only the very nascent Internet, which I connect to until 1997 or so. Even then, I mostly learned through the Berkeley Public Library, which had a few important books on marionette building in the reference section.

Most of what I knew about making puppets came from a 1939 publication of ‘The Marionette in Motion: The Püterschein System Diagrammed, Described.’ A book by William Addison Dwiggins, a member of our troupe was allowed to photocopy. Those seven pages were my only reference for years to come. Even after the rise of the Internet, information remained hard to come by; I taught myself in a vacuum, through trial and error. I never met a professional puppeteer or maker until 2006.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I have too many goals!

I’ve been working on my own marionette resource book. It’s written for the young puppeteer I was, who was desperate for information that was scarce, and still is. I’ve already been working on it for six years and have no idea when it will be finished. What it will be is a complete visualized instruction manual, drawn in comic book form, which will guide the crafts person though the theory, techniques, and materials, to build any marionette. The book will cover story structure, script writing, patterning and sewing, sets, props, and building a marionette stage as well.

I am highly inspired by the great craft manuals of the 1970s, which taught you macramé or chair-building, through beautiful hand-drawn illustrations. Because the task is so large, I anticipate several revisions as I add information and related skills throughout the years.

I am also working on a marionette-based film, titled; NOTAMAN, designing and building all the sets and puppets in my small apartment in Portland, Oregon.

I have at least a half dozen comics on the back burner and a thousand puppets and illustrations trapped in my head.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.geahk.art
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/castironcarousel
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/geahkburchill

Image Credits

Artist photo holding hare puppet | Windy Wray

Staged photo of; Cybernetically-Enhanced Hare on Gurney | Geahk Burchill

Storyboard illustration of; Robot & Endangered Child | Geahk Burchill

Staged set photos of a single puppet in a set; Farmer & field / Doctor & Library | David Emmite

Staged photo of; Swagman Setting Camp | Nathan Carty

Staged photo of Rick Rubin marionette | Geahk Burchill

Performance photo of; Farmer & Child in Graveyard | Malia Ariadne

Comic illustration of; homeless encampment | Geahk Burchill