Charlie Myers

Charlie is a gender-queer puppeteer and was part of Bradford Producing Hub’s Empowered LGBTQIA+ 2023 cohort. They’ve worked on productions up and down the UK for the past 5 years, they’re based in the North-West of England. Charlie makes puppets from organic/found materials and created a series of short films named ‘Frankenstein’s Monstera’. This series showcases their puppets, puppeteering and film-making, the series aims to prove the existence of gender-queerness throughout human history, each film is based on gender-queer stories and characters from different mythologies and religious texts/inscryptions, like Dionysus (Greek Mythology) and Asushunamir (Mesopotamian Mythology).

Charlie has 5 years of training in Designing/Making and Performance Art from their time at Kendal College and St Mary’s University where they achieved a First Class Bachelor of Arts Degree. They specialised in puppet-making and puppetry, immersive experiences and performance devising and design. 

Charlie experiences their creativity as a spiritual resistance which they channel into the relinquishing of the capitalist narratives placed upon them (like the gender they were assigned at birth). Charlie’s work is created from locally sourced/found materials, like wood and living organisms such as plants and leaves. Charlie experiments with these materials, carving faces and fingers, cutting arms and legs, sewing leaves into clothes and engraving eyes and teeth from this place of creative non-conformity until what they’ve created is looking back at them, both of them know their purpose on the earth.

Themes that pop up consistently in Charlie’s work are community, spirituality, queerness, the embracing of strangeness and resistance to conformity. One of Charlie’s biggest motivations in their artistic practice comes from the urgent need for compassion that they see in the world, Charlie wants to tell stories and work with other’s stories that show how important it is to be compassionate and loving so that we can lead ourselves into an even brighter future.

Something that helped shape Charlie’s art was working at UpFront puppet theatre in Cumbria, they took Charlie on for some puppet shows and took their breath away with their hospitality and charming, funny, powerful puppetry. Another part of Charlie’s inspiration and motivation is the injustices and the subsequent protests that took place during the 2020 lockdown. Witnessing racism, transphobia and ableism, and joining the large amount of people standing against it, pushed Charlie in a direction that they’d rarely seen before then.

The work that Charlie makes is intended to make a change in people’s hearts. Charlie hopes to show how beautifully necessary it is to us, to be freely compassionate to others and to ourselves.

“The most valuable part of the Empowered programme was gaining a new community, and learning about and meeting people who are in similar positions to me – learning from them is so exciting, rewarding and ‘Empowering’. It reminded me of who my art is about and who it is for and when others recited their experiences and excitement about the art they like it showed me that art has as much of an impact on others as it does on me, and now I have an awesome, supportive community who want to help me and who I want to help too!”