Coffee bean Puppet

Still using the idea of a marionette as a metaphor for the control and enforcement associated with slavery, I decided to make a 3-D marionette puppet. So out of wire, papermache, and lots of glue, I made a little man with moveable limbs. I then painted him in black paint and glue on lots of coffee beans. I chose coffee beans as I have already been looking at the coffee bean slave trade. I made this coffee bean puppet for photography purposes, as I did not want the puppet itself to be the finished piece. I wanted the image to look like a childrens toy, discarded and not being played with. I wanted the viewer to realise on closer look that he was actually made from coffee beans. I wanted this to be a metaphor for child slave labour, how these children work all day instead of having a childhood, how the coffee bean trade has taken over and they themselves have lost their identity and how a destruction of innocence is present in the work.