‘Resilient Rabbit’ — my first DIY automata! 🐰⚙️

I’m slowly chipping away at learning how to make automata, and this is my first solo flight. A design of my own making: a bunny what goes up and then goes down and then goes up and then goes down and then — wait for it — goes up again.

It’s made from all offcuts and scrap, invasives and forage. The handle is made of invasive buckthorn wood, and the pink of the ears are dyed with buckthorn bark. The rabbit is needlefelted with fibre donated by our generous angora rescue rabbit Abbie, with a couple of final touches made from local sheep’s wool. The dowels I bought secondhand, the moss I foraged and dried from our woods. (It had been scuffed off a rock by some critter just passing through…)

So what is the point of an object like this, in a world such as ours?

Art is “arguments against despair”. As Jack Layton said: “Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic.”

Or as Pádraig Ó Tuama said, in his always excellent weekly newsletter:

“What I am interested in is unexpected gatherings of people who manage to tolerate working together to make surprising things emerge from their unexpected coalitions. It asks those with power to name the layers of power they have and to employ that power for collective good. ... Surprise is an old human emotion. When employed for the purposes of creating — not destroying — it can elicit energy, ideas and work.”

Like this wee rabbit, sometimes being surprised can cause us to need some time in the comforting surety of our burrows. And sometimes our curiousity for what we might do next, how we might help others, ourselves, and the world, might lead us to pop back out into the light again.

Have a lovely day folks!