Corinne Beardsley: The Companion

The Companion is a crude life-size foam puppet Corinne Beardsley performed with in her Brooklyn apartment during isolation in the first few months of Covid 2020. Through observational humor and parodying the theater of influence, The Companion was “thriving in uncertain times”. Embedded in this project is the Pygmalion / Galatea power dynamic between the sculptor and enlivened object of affection. The two performed their own reality show, highlighting the absurdity of quarantining with a puppet boyfriend. Tara Eisenberg sits down with Corinne Beardsley in preparation for The Companion’s public debut and celebration of his fifth birthday at Practice Gallery in Philadelphia, PA.

Here we are  in your lovely home in Upstate New York, and we are going to have a conversation about a project that started almost five years ago when you were still living in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Today we’ll talk about how some ideas have evolved and how you’ve revisited them. Behind me is a life-size, maybe larger than life companion sculpture, puppet friend relation. He is elongated in a black leather recliner, about to change the channel, which could be a trigger for some people. And so what I’m wondering is, how did you two first meet and how did it feel to reconnect today?

Well, I made him so I… when I met the material that he was made of, a neighbor was throwing a couch cushion out of my apartment building. So it was in the trash, and then I took it to my studio, because I save foam to sculpt or pack with.  He was actually the foam I would take naps on in the studio.  I had to use what materials I had in the first months of COVID and I didn’t want him to be too realistic because I didn’t really want to live with a real person. And I wanted him to still feel like foam. I love the textures of foam, a nice carving line. I made him pretty crude and cut him up, put some wire in and so he could hold his poses and dressed him. I tried to make him as fast as possible before I could stop myself. I had some charcoal to draw his face. 

There’s a real sense of freedom in creating a puppet rather than a sculptural object, which is tied to the whole history and traditions of figurative sculpture, because it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s activated by all the other elements of the stage. He’s functional. I made him so that he could serve his function as a stand-in partner. That’s where the line of sculptural realism was made… I was like, “You’re good enough.”  Everything was very immediate. COVID had just happened, and I was going to make him as a joke for myself and friends. And then this whole project, it kind of snowballed.

When you say snowball I’m picturing the kind of event where gravity takes over and before you know it, the power is no longer something you’re in control of. Is that something that you felt when you were sculpting this companion? That there was some other energy coming to be?

It’s very powerful to make figurative sculpture. And it’s powerful to make something life size. And it’s very powerful to sit with him and to be alone with him for months.

The first scene we did was on the couch. We were just relaxing together and looking at our phones, and that was it. When I had finished sculpting him the night before, he was sitting on the couch there and then I put his arm around me and laid on him. Going through this time, there was a lot of grief, and feeling limited sources of comfort or having anyone present to share things with. We all felt uncertainty for how long this would go on. Resting on him was kinda his creation moment, where I was realizing that I had made this puppet partner, and I was going to live with him, and laugh about it.

And then being reunited today. How did that feel?

I hadn’t seen him since 2021, and I thought he looked great. I was suprised at how big he was. I was gasping all day walking around the house and him shocking me when I turned the corner, and a little in disbelief that I had lived with the puppet cause it has such a presence. He had the last expression from the previous performance I did with him. I don’t really alter him after the performances. I just wait till the next thing and then I’ll spruce him back up. I have been storing him, but he was all folded up in a black trash bag and his feet behind his ears all crisscrossed, holding onto the back of his legs with his arms. I really liked him all folded up like that in the trash bag with the doggie.

So he’s become a bit of a yogi in the time that he’s been away?

Yeah. haha

I wanna shift to your relationship with him before he went away to sharpen his yoga practice. When you’ve described this project in the past, you’ve said there’s some kind of Pygmalion relationship between the artist and art that can get blurry. 

In the western tradition of sculpture, the sculptor strives to bring vitality and life’s energy to the forms of the figure. And it can be achieved by the craft and magic of the hands’ translation of reality. Pygmalion was lacking enthusiasm for women in his reality, so he sculpted his ideal sculpture of a woman. Because he fell in love with Galatea and prayed enough to Aphrodite, she brought the sculpture to life. It’s all very one-sided because she’s still the object of his affection, desires and idealization. It’s kinda creepy to think about him caressing her curves and features for hours, and then when she becomes alive, he’s still petting her. She doesn’t have any agency and never spoke in Ovid’s Metamorphosis.

But that’s the same with The Companion. He’s never spoken. He doesn’t…who knows if this is consensual, if he wants to take part in this. He has no name and is only referred to as The Companion. Even more debasing, our relationship is only for show! Maybe, the same could be said with any sculpture or puppet. It’s like, that sculpture doesn’t wanna be ventriloquized or their actions dictated by their creator. Is it because it looks like us that we want to regard it as a sentient being? All it takes is a smile on a bloody Wilson ball like in Castaway for our imaginations to attach…There are those complexities of adoring something that you make, trying to imbue a life force into figurative sculpture, an inanimate object. As he developed a character through my animations, I was investigating it as a parody of the Pygmalion story, from a female perspective in an isolated time.

So this urge to create life that you’re describing or even to charge life into form that might not necessarily ever be able to have lifelike characteristics, I think that’s a very relatable idea,  coming from this need to be loved, need to be in a society, in a community, in a family. Sometimes it feels like we’re losing those connections a little bit. The loneliness epidemic is something that I see a lot of headlines and literature on, that being alone is becoming more prevalent. And I think we saw that exacerbated during COVID. How did this project affect you during COVID? How has it felt for you since then, looking back in terms of the companion actually giving you companionship?

What was great about him is that it was a way for me to connect with people. It didn’t go viral, but it definitely had more reach than any of my other artwork. And since we couldn’t be together, we were sharing on the screen, a lot of people were just consuming media…It felt vulnerable. But I made it playful and was cathartic to do a parody of what I saw other couples do.

At times it felt like playing with a doll and giving it parts of your histories and imagination. And it is also a reflection of what I’m crowdsourcing from the scroll when that was our primary source to connect.

When you were sort of at the height of your companionship with your companion, did you ever find a moment where you felt like you had to do something because you knew it would play well on social media or satisfy the audience? How do you think social media influenced your relationship with your companion?

I think it fueled it completely. When he was just in the house and not performing, there was no affection. There was no… I didn’t do anything with him unless the camera was on. It was a very for the screen relationship. He was just a clumsy prop that I got out of the way, I didn’t even want to look at him. I mean, I was with him alone for three months, nobody came in the apartment and nobody met him, and I’m just showing this story online.

There was a sense of obligation to continue the story. Online trends and comedy change in a couple months’ cycle. It probably would’ve gotten too drawn out or lost its magic if I did more.

It wasn’t like a diary entry or reflection, it was part of the performance art. Your boundaries– how when you’re home alone, not performing, this companion was more of a passive prop in your life. But we are moving into an era where it feels like there aren’t sometimes healthy boundaries between a companion that’s not real and humans. It can be one-sided, but then you also see headlines where young people are falling in love with their AI companion. How does your brain know the difference between an AI companion, and a long distance friend? Maybe the neuro pathways are kind of the same. I’m wondering if you wanna comment on how now it’s an AI companion, it can be even just Siri or Alexa… you don’t have any devices I’m activating right now, do you?

I’m finding myself comparing the AI and puppet companions. In an AI relationship – a machine mimicking human intelligence, programmed to agree with you, support you, and be available whenever you want them. Which satisfies that basic baby need of a response, a signal and a smile from a loved one. This puppet companion relationship- created and trapped in my apartment performing my imagination of our relationship–is comedy, and also rewarded me with a response- not from the puppet, but from an audience. Both are digital responses – and each technology of social media and AI have changed our human connections. Will it construct unrealistic expectations in communication, when you are texting with a robot more than a spontaneous, free-willed, complex person? Will we lose our sense to decipher between the two? Will we value human connection less? 

Well, the beauty of your relationship is that you used that performance to bring other people together. And so in a way you created a community of people who were connecting over this object. That’s a really special surprise that came out of it for me.

Yeah, that surprised me too. During that time, there was a sense of community care, being less individualized and aware of going through something together.

So, tell me about this smaller foam friend.

Well, every time I went to the park, it was just littered with puppies. Everyone was getting a puppy. I had been noticing this for weeks, and I thought, of course, we have to get a puppy. It took me a while to decide to name it “Foameranian”.

[The puppy] was also a connector between me and the companion – to have something else to focus on than ourselves. It represented a way to nurture and to have this object of affection together. 

What is your favorite thing about the companion?

You know what’s interesting is I’m thinking about his physical attributes. I like his feet.

Really, it’s not his personality?

No. It’s not, haha. I really love how I sculpted his feet. Yeah. That’s actually very revealing…I also enjoy his hands, there’s certain cuts and gestures of the hand. So my favorite thing about him are some of the physical attributes that I sculpted…how so very Pygmalion of me…