Practice Development

Performances, puppets, and responsive installations shaped through material-led practices in both analogue and digital environments.These works reflect an ongoing conversation between craft, technology, and ecological awareness. They bring together puppetry, textiles, and interaction to explore how materials can become storytellers

Early Explorations in Puppetry, Physical Theatre & Code

My early practice was shaped by physical theatre, improvisation, and puppetry. I trained in both body-based performance and object animation, working across live theatre, street performance, and devised forms.

Later, during my MFA in Computational Arts at Goldsmiths, I began integrating digital tools into my performance-making. I created interactive installations where sensors, masks, sound, and servo motors responded to human presence. These early works explored how objects and systems could become performers in their own right, using code, motion, and material expression.

Analogue & Digital Conversations

Before Textile Creatures, I explored the blending of tactile craft and digital technology through projection-based installations, voice-reactive masks, and hybrid performances. In these works, analogue textures and coded behavior came together to produce layered, embodied experiences.

These performances, including Working Girl Going to Motherhood, My Name Is, and Look at the Other, delve into themes of identity, transformation, and human-machine boundaries. Each invites the audience into a space where material and digital forms co-author the performance.

Shifting Focus : Material Interference & Textile characters

During my PhD at the Royal College of Art, I started working with thermochromic inks, conductive threads and plant-based materials like seaweed, weaving them directly into puppet-making and performative textiles. Instead of directing the materials, I let them take on an active role: heat, light and touch became ways for a character to move, change and tell part of its own story. That shift, from controlling material to listening to it, is still the starting point for everything I make now.

Thermochromic puppet staged outdoor and changing colour with the heat from the sunlight (S.Recoules Quang 2022)

Current Work : Poetic Systems & More-than-human-Storytelling 

To grow this practice beyond small, hand-worked pieces, I trained in Saori weaving, an improvisational Japanese loom technique, through a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England. I wove copper wire, nichrome wire, silver thread and thermochromic fibres directly into the cloth alongside plant-based yarns, testing how tension and placement change how a piece moves. One finding stayed with me: thermochromic colour change worked indoors but stopped in the cold outdoors, which pushed me toward humidity and sound as other ways for a material to respond, and toward hydrochromic materials as an alternative to heat.

That question, what a material can tell us if we stop directing it and start listening, is what I'm carrying into Textile Migrants-An Ecological Tale, my current stop-motion project. Handmade textile creatures move through forced displacement, their thermochromic materials communicating with their environment through colour rather than holding one fixed form. I'm building the puppets, weaving their world and wiring the circuitry behind them by hand, and sharing that process as I go on Substack and Instagram.

Next Evolution: Materials, Collaboration, & Practice Growth

I'm looking for ways to grow this work further: more training in responsive textile fabrication, and time with people who think about performance, materials and technology differently than I do, artists, technologists, ecologists, curators, anyone drawn to what happens when craft and code share the same thread.

Textile Migrants is where that's happening right now. If you'd like to follow the puppets, the weaving and the circuitry as they come together, or talk about a residency, commission or collaboration, I'd love to hear from you, on Substack, Instagram.