People

Bryony Anderson is a designer, maker and artist with a passion for creating innovative work from frugal resources. Since 1997, her puppets and constructions for visual performance have toured nationally and internationally with many Australian theatre, puppetry and performance companies. She has also been an exhibiting artist, a creative director of community projects, and a mentor.

Design and construction credits include: Terrapin (A Not So Traditional Story, The Egg), Monkey Baa ((Diary of a Wombat), My Darling Patricia (The Piper/ Africa/ Night Garden/ Posts in the Paddock), Born in a Taxi (Whale’s Tale/ Boat of Faith), Loose Canon (Trash Alchemy), Theatre of Image (Monkey/ Stella and the Moonman/ Lulie the Iceberg), Erth (The Garden/ Nargun and the Stars/ Petting Zoo/ Dream of the Thylacine), Malcolm C. Cooke (The Hobbit/ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), as well as Fleur Noble, Chamber Made Opera, Circus Monoxide, and more. She has also made life sized dinosaur puppets for the LA Museum of Natural History, the Auckland Museum and the Museum of Victoria.

Bryony has conducted over 100 community workshops in communities from the Central Desert and rural Victoria to inner Sydney and coastal NSW, with ages ranging from preschool to the elderly. She has held mentoring roles in project design for emerging artists, work experience for local high school students, and professional development for makers in her solar powered bush workshop and interstate. Bryony has been the subject of a documentary for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery on artist processes, and was Artist in Residence in Ashfield in 2004 and at Glasshouse Regional Gallery, Port Macquarie, in 2018.

As an exhibiting artist, she has had three solo exhibitions ranging from intricate illustrations (Sick People, Wollongong City Gallery 2008) to a hand built projection machine (Scape-o-Matic, WCG 2004), and the interactive installation Pets and Livestock (Project Contemporary Artspace 1997), all investigating a salvaged aesthetic. She was Trainee Puppetmaker with Skyworks Studios (Canberra) in 1997, a scholarship student at Wollongong University, and received her BCA in 1999.

In 2011 she established One Off Makery, and began working with locals to seed a creative industry of skilled artisans making high calibre work from frugal resources. From this Frugal Arts Inc and the award-winning Frugal Forest Project grew, involving 1170 participants across the Mid North Coast over three years in its creation. The Forest toured to venues across NSW including a season at the Sydney Opera House and reached an audience of over 60,000. One Off Makery’s most recent forays have been into participatory events and film making.

Bryony joined Terrapin as artist in residence in 2019, working on a number of creative and new work developments, and collaborating with the participants in our professional development program.