about – Sanctum Studio

Sanctum Studio | about

Sanctum Theatre is a Melbourne-based visual performance ensemble presenting folk theatre in everyday spaces since 2006.

Lachlan Plain, puppets, performance, theatre, theater, Melbourne, Australia, visual, site specific, roving acts, puppetry, public art, community, design, illustration, painting, drawing, art, studio, street art, mural, murals, installation, projection, light, lantern, sculpture, sculptural, artist, exhibition

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lament: candles & compost (Abbotsford Convent 2006)

``Theatre is a space in which the waking mind can address its illness; where paradox isn't hypocrisy and mortality isn't ignored; it is a sanctuary where monstrous apparitions can be viewed at arms length and laughed at; it is the shared pretense of momentary madness...``

--Henrietta Kuscht (1929)

SANCTUM STUDIO is a lens through which monstrous apparitions are made manifest, tearing fissures in the fabric of monotony.

SANCTUM STUDIO (formerly SANCTUM THEATRE) is visual production company specialising in puppetry and animation. We have been presenting live art in everyday spaces since 2006.

Our work has been described as ‘…full of striking images…’ (The Age), ‘…confronting and yet comforting…’ (Inpress) and ‘forg[ing] a dark and surreal dystopia, packed with visual surprises,’ (The Age).

In 2017 we won a Green Room Award for puppetry and our short films have screened at festivals around the world.

Through the shared spectacle of Sanctum Community Projects (SCP), we work with diverse communities to re-mystify local landscapes in the communal imagination.

We create giant puppets for government and commercial clients, such as White Night, Melbourne Museum and Moomba Parade. See Sanctum Puppet Commissions (SPC).

We aim to translate our naïve, tactile aesthetic into the digital realm, through immersive animations and extended reality. We approach this technology as Georges Méliès or Karel Zamen approached film in the twentieth century – like children in a playground.

Our art is a communion with the land. We animate the inanimate.