Lisa’s living dolls combine her
Meet the Brontë sisters as you have never seen them before, in the form of fascinating, if slightly eerie, small wooden automata models to wind and watch as they read their novels to their aching hearts’ content.
“I have always thought I should make them because they are only over the hill,” says automata maker Lisa Slater, whose workshop, at Northlight Art Studios in Hebden Bridge, is only eight miles away from the Brontes’ Haworth home by foot.
“I started with the idea of making little wooden folk art dolls – penny dolls or farthing dolls – so I bought myself a small wood turning lathe,” she says. “When you look at that picture that Branwell painted of his sisters, they look like kind of wooden people.”
Influenced by historical craft and folk art, a love of animals and humour, Lisa creates simple mechanical automata pieces, many of them bespoke commissions, each unique, and working in harmony with the woods they are crafted from.
The Brontë automatons are wooden doll-like characters that turn and perform simple movements – turning her head and lifting a copy of Wuthering Heights, in Emily’s case. She encases them in old woodensewingmachinedrawers, which used to be plentiful when there was a trend for putting hardwood table tops on old iron sewing machines, but are harder to come by now. “They are beautiful and they have their own character,” says Lisa.
She is making them for private clients and to sell at Hawksbys Gallery at Haworth (the sisters sell individually at £345 each, although Anne is less popular), but she also has plans to place all three sisters within an old round station clock case she has found.
The look of the sisters is based on Branwell Bronte’s famous portrait.
“He went crackers and painted himself out,” she says. “I intend to put them in there reading their books and I’m going to have Branwell on a disc so he rotates in and rotates out behind them.”
The concept of automata is a curious one in a modern world, but there are, surprisingly, quite a few automata makers working today and gathering their work together for automata exhibitions. “There is always one happening somewhere in the country,” Lisa says. Lisa moved to Hebden Bridge in 1992 and lives close to her workplace in an unusual home, an underdwelling with another house on top of it.
“It’s a lovely walk down into town to get to my workshop and then a walk up home as well, with the day’s productive pieces to start my stove with,” she says, lifting up a bag of wood cuttings to show me.
Automata became popular in 18th century France, Lisa explains, but in the 1980s, there was a resurgence by modern bespoke craftspeople. “Sue Jackson had Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, an automata museum based in Covent Garden, where you could see lots of mechanical things,” she says.
It is now run by Sue’s daughter, Sarah Alexander, based in Bexhill, and hosts online international touring exhibitions.
Born in Barnsley, Lisa’s father was a music lecturer and her mother a primary school teacher. At school Lisa’s designteachertookthestudents to see the graduate shows at Manchester Metropolitan University, so she decided that was where she wanted to study, taking a degree in metal, ceramics and glass. For her final show, she specialised in automata, making moving rustic donkeys.
Deciding she ought to be sensible, she took a teacher training course at Sheffield and found a post at Skipton Girls High School, where she