About

Axlebone is a new project for Bryony Anderson, backed by 27 years of experience as a designer, puppetmaker, facilitator and creative director. We make and design for performance, develop and teach sustainable practice, and guide processes of imagination and creation with young people.

Our work is multi-award winning and has toured nationally and internationally with many Australian companies. It has mesmerised or bemused audiences in galleries, festivals, theatres, schools, museums and streets. We’ve taught online and in face-to-face intensives, and led over 130 workshops in rural, desert and urban communities. Continued mentoring of emerging artists is integral to the role of teacher, and we learn together.

Puppet Design and Construction Intensive, Terrapin 2023, featuring Edith, Mads, Linda and Fran. Photo Peter Matthew

A student of sculptor Ian Gentle, Bryony staged her first solo exhibition in 1997 and received a BCA from University of Wollongong in 1999. She established One Off Makery in 2011, in an off-grid shed in the mountains. OOM made puppets for urban companies around Australia, including Terrapin, Monkey Baa, Theatre of Image, My Darling Patricia and Born in a Taxi. It also focused on developing a vocabulary of techniques for working with salvaged materials and including local community in creative projects. A series of participatory works ensued including the Frugal Forest Project, an immersive rainforest installation made entirely from materials headed for landfill. The project included over 1100 participants from preschool to aged care, and toured to regional galleries around NSW.

Frugal Forest premiere at Glasshouse Port Macquarie, 2016. photo Katie Anderson-Kelly and Simon Webber

In 2019 a residency with Terrapin Puppet Theatre in nipaluna/Hobart turned into five years, as Lead Maker and Head of Workshop and consulting on design and sustainability. In that time a thriving workshop was established, training makers, producing shows and developing systems for sustainable practice. The workshop built three touring shows, a performance tailored for aged care settings, a creative learning program for schools, two roving acts, and an outdoor spectacular in that time.

Bryony was a participant in Creative Australia’s Creative Climate Leadership program, and has experienced natural disaster and its effect on communities first-hand. In the times ahead, Axlebone intends to explore the territory where climate upheaval, trauma and imagination meet, and to seek collaborations with like and unlike minds.

Axlebone pays respect to the lands, waterways and skies that make life possible, and to all those who honour them. We live and work, gratefully, on unceded palawa/pakana lands.