Wanna have your partner's puppet?

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Puppet artist Deniz Orhon’s Web site, where she sells puppets she creates, is a new favorite of couples. By making a purchase online, a wife can get a puppet of her husband

VERCİHAN ZİFLİOĞLU
ISTANBUL - Turkish Daily News

Puppets of Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Turkish Finance Minister Kemal Unakıtan are the favorites of 25-year-old puppet artist Deniz Orhon. She said her preference was to produce puppets reflecting social problems, taking her biggest source of inspiration from daily life.

Last year, Orhon designed a Web site where puppets she created were displayed. Unexpectedly, her site was flooded with orders. �All of a sudden, the orders increased so much that I began spending 24 hours in my workshop,� she said.

Nowadays, Orhon is busy producing a six-minute slow motion picture, hoping to show it at national and international festivals. Inspired by Czech writer Franz Kafka's �Metamorphosis,� Orhon decided to produce a puppet of Gregor Samsa, the main character in the story. She took 9,000 snapshots, designed hundreds of costumes and drew eight different heads in order to get a perfect final product.

Bride & groom puppets

The first puppet character Orhon gave life to was named Edith. The bug-eyed Edith is a hunchback and bears a weary facial expression. �Edith embodies social problems,� said Orhon.

Another puppet, a bride wearing a torn-off wedding dress, is called �Bride-Groom.� The expression on her face reflects pure sorrow, �for she was forced to marry an old and wealthy men,� Orhon explained.

Orhon shot a film starring the two puppets set on the Marmara coastline near Istanbul's Bostancı district.

�Puppets I dream of are a part of my life. Puppets for sale on my Web site finance the puppets in my dreams,� she said. The price of the puppets sold on Orhon's Web site ranges from YTL 450 to 1,000. She receives most orders from married couples and art lovers.

Her customers have many unusual requests, Orhon noted. �A customer asked me to make her husband's puppet in sexy underwear. Another one asked me to make her mother's in a swimsuit and her father's in tennis apparel. She asked me to make her brother's puppet in women's apparel.�

Facial expressions

Orhon uses as models for her puppets the photographs customers provide her. �I work on a puppet for days and days to make it look exactly like the person in the photo,� she said.

�When I look at someone's face, I can easily do a character analysis because I analyze details of faces in photos for days,� she added.

Orhon's materials are wood, plastic foam, mud and plaster. She produces three types of puppets: puppets on a string, hand puppets and desktop puppets. But she said the first type is definitely her favorite.

�Every minute, I dream of giving life to a puppet I am dreaming of,� the artist said. She is always saving the hundreds of faces she sees on the streets in the labyrinths of her memory. �Those faces becomes faces of puppets I dream of and then I produce them. �



http://www.kutukutupense.net