Reviewers in Chicago call his puppets "magnificently empathetic creations," hand-crafted wonders constructed in a basement far from the stage lights of the big city. In his Northside home and workshop, Jesse Mooney-Bullock approaches each new project with a confidence born of years of creative exploration and a determination born of raising two young sons.
Jesse Mooney-Bullock, 33, attended Walnut Hills High School, then earned a degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduation, he followed his wife, Ryan, 34, to New Hampshire where she obtained her masters in education while he worked as a cabinetmaker. After two years, the couple moved back to Cincinnati. They now reside in Northside with their five- and two-year-old sons.
In his home and professional life, Mooney-Bullock balances family and work, realms of existence that often intertwine. In his basement, a furry mongoose sits on a shelf, a remnant of a local production of Rikki Tikki Tavi. Faces with eyes that seem to follow visitors' moves hang on the walls. A praying mantis Halloween costume, made for one of his sons, hangs in the rafters next to an eight-foot bed bug he wore in the Northside Fourth of July parade. His computer screensaver mixes images of his puppet creations and his family. He even created a workbench that allows his boys to work side-by-side with him, but admits that doesn’t always happen.
While his wife works 30-plus hours a week as an educator at the Civic Garden Center, he splits his time between making puppets and caring for their sons.
“Parenting is a full time job,” Mooney-Bullock says. “It’s been a challenge to find our way, but we do what we have to.”
The puppet maker started finding his own way when he was a small child. He recalls the first thing he created was a table. After finishing the table, he sat it near the curb outside his house with a sign that read, “For Sale.” He was eight years old. Through Mooney-Bullock's life, his father and stepfather were always doing building projects for their houses, so in high school, he took art and shop classes.
At the SAIC, where instead of a specific major, students create their own mix of classes, Mooney-Bullock originally focused on illustration. Along the way, he took performance and puppetry classes. He met fellow students who shared his affinity for puppetry and they formed a roving puppet troupe, Unstrung. The troupe created public spectacles that could be carried in suitcases and performed in public spaces, including parks and subways.
“None of us really knew much about it, we were just interested in it,” Mooney-Bullock says. “We did it by looking at pictures and just trying to create things.”
From there, he took classes from a professor and puppeteer in Chicago,
Blair Thomas. He apprenticed with Thomas, with whom he still works. Thomas taught Mooney-Bullock much of what he knows and helped him build connections for finding work. One connection was the
Redmoon Theater, which Thomas founded. Redmoon's current showing of Shakespeare's
The Tempest features almost 10 of Mooney-Bullock’s puppets, which have garnered critical acclaim for their realism and depth.
Chris Jones of the
Chicago Tribune wrote, “Jesse Mooney-Bullock's puppets are magnificently empathetic creations, much fuller than most puppets and so full of character, nuance and sadness that I constantly found myself staring into their eyes." Two of the puppets even have interchangeable faces, which flip back and forth with a simple snap of the wrist. It's feat of engineering he had never tried before, but it works flawlessly.
Mooney-Bullock credits the beauty of natural wood for his puppets' beauty. After carving out the shapes he wants, he mainly uses graphite to shade the puppets. He tried creating more cartoon-like puppets, but says they didn’t feel right. The realistic approach has become a signature of his work.
“He always was unique in the way that he had this ability to actualize something beyond most students,” says Thomas. “There are a lot of people who can create beautiful puppets, but his ability to engineer a puppet to have a presence simply by that way it moves is exceptional.”
Mooney-Bullock has been honing both those skills for years. Members of Unstrung created all their own puppets and acted out their performances. But he got even more woodworking practice when he worked as a cabinetmaker while his wife was in grad school.
Since his return to Cincinnati, Mooney-Bullock has won a City of Cincinnati grant to create an adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling classic, Rikki Tikki Tavi. The mongoose he finally used for the performance was the third or fourth iteration of the puppet. “I just kept working on the mechanism to move the puppet’s head until it worked the way I wanted,” he says. “Sometimes they take a few tries, but in the end it always ends up working.”
The mongoose alone took Mooney-Bullock a couple of months to build, partly because it was his first time creating such a puppet and partly because he was simultaneously balancing the rest of his life through the process.
“I had these delusions of grandeur that my boys would sit and work on their workbench for hours on end while I worked right beside them,” Jesse says. “It happens, but not more than 30 minutes at a time.”
Still, he relishes his one-of-a-kind challenge. He would rather spend time with his family and do something he loves than be consumed by a traditional nine-to-five job. No matter what new challenge a new day brings, Mooney-Bullock is determined to face them, one by one.
Next up? Creating 30 masks to make an army of monkeys for a public spectacle Redmoon Theater performs later this year.
“I’ve never done anything of this size,” Mooney-Bullock says. “I just ordered a bunch of urethane and rubber to create molds. I’m sure it will go smoothly after the first one.”