I am an interdisciplinary artist based in Glasgow.
I like to bring things to life through making and performance, inspired by an expanded conception of puppetry, foregrounding its counter-cultural roots in folk and outsider art.
My practice centers performance and participation to explore the transformative potentials of communal dreaming. I do this through a holistic approach to puppetry: where the body, space, and senses (touch, sound, maybe even scent) as well as the manipulations of objects, materials, and puppets, can be activated to form an experiential narrative. I'm interested in hyper-imaginative states, and I draw from the anthropological history of the trance and other eccentric methods of dreaming as sources to inform my image-making. I like mechanical magic, countercultural mischief and more-than-sculptures, especially ones that get the public to engage with their ordinary surroundings in new ways, to evoke the personal, historical and ecological poetics of our shared world.
My works generally stick to an ethos laid out by Bread & Puppet Theatre in the Why Cheap Art Manifesto (1984), and hope to contribute to developing economically and environmentally mindful systems of making.
email me at: fibicowley(at)gmail(dot)com
my insta is @wispies
In 2024 I co-founded an experimental puppetry-art-theatre collective, TINY House Puppetry, with theatre-maker Dix McDevitt. We collaborate with local musicians and artists to create performances and events that push the boundaries of what puppetry could be, a tool for radical connection across every barrier imaginable, and bring it into unexpected spaces with new kinds of audiences.
Also in 2023 I studied at the Curious School of Puppetry, and later became a member of Still Curious: the artist network founded by Sarah Wright to support students beyond their studies. Every year, Still Curious hosts a takeover of the Rosemary Branch Theatre in London to present experimental works to a supportive audience of puppetry inclined folk.
Between 2022-24, I was part of the School of the Damned Cohort. The school was founded in 2014 as a reaction to the increasing financialisation of Higher Education in the UK. SotD has no tuition fees, is student led and peer supported. Scottish SOTD'ers were part of the community legally occupying the M&S on Sauchiehall Street via Outer Spaces between 2023-24.
In 2021, I lived and worked at/with DARP, which later became The Field, an artist community, based in an old Steiner School in Derbyshire. Together we put together the show: Playground, at Artcore Derby, during our residency there. We also hosted local Nothingham artists for a DARP weekender, within which me and Ella Yolande shared the work: Motherbug. The Field/DARP continued for many years after my involvement, hosting residencies, events and exhibitions on and off site, and in 2024 after the building's demolition, the existing members organised a retrospective exhibition, The Field is Forever, at Two Queens, Leicester, of which I was a part of.
During my studies, I helped to found a short-lived collective called BOG. It was fun while it lasted. Together we put on two shows and were residents for the iconic but now defunct art disco Rhythm Machine at Summerhall Arts Centre. Lots of good memories :-)
