Laura Heit Short Films

Visualizing What We Can’t See:
The Puppetry and Animation of Laura Heit

An Essay by Will Bixby

Laura Heit is an artist who moves fluidly across forms, working as a puppeteer, animator, and designer. A multi-hyphenate maker, she built her practice as master builder and puppet designer for Chicago’s Redmoon Theater and through formal training at both the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and London’s Royal College of Art. Across mediums, Heit describes her work as visualizing the things we can’t see, making the invisible, the overlooked, and the imagined suddenly tangible. With three distinct productions at the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival: a live-puppetry performance, a collection of animated short films, and an interactive gallery installation, audiences had ample opportunity at catching a glimpse of the unseen. 

Short Films  

Heit has been making hand-drawn animation films for as long as she has puppetry. Indeed, as Heit describes it, puppetry is itself a mode of animation, as both forms are about giving movement to something—an image, an object, an idea—that brings it to life. Across her fourteen animated short films, this focus on movement is central, most clearly demonstrated in her abstract animation piece, Snow Lee Leopard. 

Snow Lee Leopard depicts a continuous loop of hand-drawn shapes—straight and squiggly lines, stars, pyramids, spheres—as they appear, disappear, and reappear, like a flow of improvisation to the accompaniment of rhythmic drumming. We watch as the shapes fold in on themselves, rising and falling with a breath-like cadence that increases in pace and intensity alongside the drums. While there is no readily discernible narrative to the piece, the liveliness of the shapes is endlessly captivating and becomes even more profound when Heit explains the piece’s development. 

In her question-and-answer talk-back following the short films, Heit explained that Snow Lee Leopard was created during her residency at the Leland Ironworks in Oregon with sculptor Lee Kelly. The animation we see started as sketches Heit made of Kelly’s sculptures, which slowly evolved into the abstract lines, shapes, and sequences through a process of improvisational free drawing, where each gesture informed the next. The rhythmic drumming, composed by Daniel Charles Hunt, is provided by hammers and other steel objects rapping against Kelly’s sculptures. From sight to sound, every part of the short film is an attempt to visualize the movement and emotion contained within Kelly’s sculptures, bringing life to static objects through animation. Ultimately, Snow Lee Leopard changes spectators’ perceptions by asking us to reconsider what and how we’re seeing and how movement can translate emotions, materials, and forms. 

Two other shorts embody Heit’s ability to change our perception: Rover’s Eye and Apollo 6.  Both works layer loops of hand-drawn animation over preexisting images and archival footage, creating hybrid compositions that unsettle our sense of what is real within the frame. In Rover’s Eye, clusters of abstract animated shapes rotate, dissolve, and drift across still photographs of the red planet’s surface captured by the Mars Rover Opportunity. As the slideshow transitions from one vast, barren landscape to the next, various squiggles, circles, and drifting lines fizzle and pop with restless energy.

Similarly, in Apollo Six, Heit overlays animated human figures onto archival footage shot from inside the Apollo spacecraft as it orbits the Earth. The view out the window—a steady, awe-inducing sweep of the planet—becomes the backdrop for floating bodies that drift across the frame. Sometimes they appear whole; sometimes they fragment into isolated limbs that float with a dreamlike slowness across the blackness. The abstraction of these works offers a way into their understanding that is open to anyone’s interpretation. Weaving in her animations, Heit invites us to question the authority of the camera, prompting us to look more closely and question what we see, chasing mystery and curiosity wherever we can.