Laura Heit:
The Matchbox Shows

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. 

The Matchbox Shows  

Working with Redmoon Theater during the late 1990s, Heit was well versed in the company’s large-scale, collaborative, spectacular puppet builds but wanted a change of pace. She issued herself a challenge: create a performance that was small (it had to fit in a pocket), fast (it had to be built in under an hour), and performed entirely solo. From these self-imposed limits emerged The Matchbox Shows, a project now in its twenty-fifth year of performances. 

Seated at a tabletop, Heit performs a series of short vignettes acted out by flat, miniature puppets housed within individual matchboxes. With a charming deadpan, Heit grabs a box, flips it open, and dumps it out onto the table. Each matchbox contains its own performance, and what tumbles out could be a ghost story, a circus act like the amazing cannonball bunny, a story of the Summerside Sausage Fairy (who turns little girls’ dolls into sausages), or even a forest fire where matches, as stand-ins for trees, are set ablaze.  

Spanning thematically across dreams, loss, mystery, death, and humor, there is an immense playfulness in Heit’s shows, most evident in the build and design of her paper performances. Constructed from matches, paper, cardstock, and found objects like buttons and string, her figures evoke a childlike whimsy, each patched together in an imaginative bricolage that highlights their very artificiality. Even the matchboxes themselves are puppets, flipping open to display theatrical backdrops while rotating and unfolding like the pages of a pop-up book, constantly in transformation to reveal hidden characters, props, and story worlds. 

Their modest materials suggest simplicity, but it is precisely their handmade aesthetic that makes them so impactful. Heit’s miniatures foreground their own construction, with visible jointing and scissor marks; they constantly point to their own artifice and materiality. In doing so, the physical traces of Heit’s handiwork are always on display, visualizing the unseen labor that brought them into being. The constant presence of Heit’s physical body, particularly her hands, which are always in view as the puppets slide and dance across the tabletop, continues this effect. In doing so, Heit never lets spectators forget that these little creatures are puppets, and her ability to bring them to life is made more powerful to watch. 

Heit’s small-scale manipulation on the tabletop is simulcast on a projection screen upstage of her, enlarging the action for the audience to observe in greater detail. This live feed, however, does more than magnify the action; it simultaneously disrupts and expands our perception. As we watch, we toggle between the wide-frame, miniaturized view of Heit playing with her puppets and the close-up world captured by the camera’s lens. In shrinking down, she invites the spectators to lean in and to watch her bring her characters to life; by zooming in, the camera pulls us fully into the story world. The two frames—zoomed-out and zoomed-in—operate simultaneously, diverging and overlapping in ways that complicate what it means to see her work. The result is a parallax-like experience in which spectators navigate between intimacy and distance, between the mechanics of manipulation and the illusion it produces. 

What begins as a simple exploration of miniature puppetry expands into a broader inquiry into how we look, what we notice, and how the unseen, everyday objects of our lives—something as small as a matchbox—hold the potential for imaginative world-building.