Nyssa Collins is a Knoxville based interdisciplinary artist. She studied music at Humboldt State University (BA Piano Performance, 2016) before discovering her love for puppetry and performance at Paperhand, a giant puppet company. She has performed widely as a puppeteer, performance artist, stilt walker, and musician with Paperhand, Fox & Beggar Theater, Busch Gardens, and her shadow puppet company, Deep Time Puppet Co, and in venues including the Knoxville Museum of Art, Radical Cheese at Bread and Puppet, Artspace (Raleigh), Shadowbox Studios, and Open Eye Theater (Minneapolis). She has been commissioned as a public artist by several organizations, including the Town of Chapel Hill, Raleigh Arts, and Uproar Festival of Public Art. She is pursuing an MFA in Time Based Art and a certificate in Cinema Studies.

Artist Statement

I am an an experimental animator, puppet artist, and performer. Using paper silhouettes, hand-built puppets, and found object sculpture, I create narratives about the mystical systems of meaning that humans use to navigate a complex world. My stories begin at the edge of our perception, where our imaginations do a great deal to create our experience. I am interested in the limits of our ability to fully see the forces structuring the world – where the time scale is too enormous, where systems are too complex, and where our desires and fears complicate our judgment. Many of my works are elemental, lacking words and resembling mythic origin stories, in an effort to uncover impulses and desires that are essential to the human experience. I work with potent imagery – snakes, turn of the century factory buildings, the Biblical apocalypse – and story tropes that suggest familiarity, but act as tools to probe our associative consciousness and open us to broader possibilities. I am inspired by Eastern mysticism (especially as it has filtered in through the Western zeitgeist, like by way of psychedelia) which treats reality and identity as in flux. But while my work is, to some degree, deliberately destabilizing, I greatly value trust with audiences; I often draw on humor, wonder, and play as gentle tools to foster a benevolent curiosity about the great mysteries.