In this workshop, Louise Ashcroft brings together elements of her ongoing artistic research into family, kinship, and relational dynamics.

Drawing on lived experience, shared stories, and fragments from fiction, participants will be invited to imagine and design simple puppets that embody relationships, roles, tensions, or emotional undercurrents found within families and kin networks. These figures become tools for thinking, playing, and testing ideas — a way of giving form to feelings, conflicts, affections, dependencies, and contradictions that sometimes remain unspoken.

Through hands-on making, conversation, and playful experimentation, the workshop opens a space for humour, speculation, and gentle provocation. By inhabiting the tensions and tribulations these puppets carry, participants will explore how small narratives, scripts, and scenes might emerge — attending to pressure points in family life (including chosen family), and offering space to imagine healthier ways of living together, such as more equal distributions of care, new modes of kinship, or simply new ways of getting on each other’s nerves.

This workshop welcomes anyone interested in exploring relationships in their many forms, and may be particularly relevant for those engaging with questions of family and kinship in their research, creative practice, or everyday lives. No prior experience is needed — only a willingness to play, reflect, and imagine together.

This workshop is part of Open Research: How to be Many Mothers?