JOSEPHINE LAUCK + VIM HILE / AUGUST 2025

Vim Grace Hile is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working in Chicago. She works as a performer, puppeteer, and early childhood educator. She is interested in the sacred power of storytelling as a tool to inspire and enthrall audiences, while casting reflections that bring us closer to our wells of feeling. With a dedication to surreal, uncanny and fantastical life she aims to evoke tangible responses in the audience that exist in reality, not only in dream-space which is where her stories often begin. This place between the unreal and real is where the magic she strives towards lives. Most of her works are collaborative in nature. Recently, she performed as The Green Lady in Lula Asplund and Allegra Harvard’s opera, A Silver Gilded Hand Mirror or Whispered Shell which was performed at the International Museum of Surgical Science. She co-directed with Justin D’Acci Blood and Ruin, one of six short form puppetry plays within Rough House Puppetry Art’s annual show, House of the Exquisite Corpse.

Josephine Dorsey-Lauck, a Chicago-based textile artist, works with the intricate relationships between objects and their owners, particularly; how we reckon with our cloth today. Favoring process heavy approaches like weaving, dye and print, the work seeks to inhabit a unique and ambiguous realm, existing between drawing, cloth, garment and something else. Through her work, Jo encourages viewers to reflect on the importance of craftsmanship, and its subtle disappearance which clears the way to an entirely new space for textiles to exist.

studio

WARP was special for me because it concluded a one year break from weaving since my graduation from SAIC, where textiles and weaving had been at the forefront of my mind for 4 years. During that break I focused on performance, writing and cultivating the studio space/gallery project, Schoolhouse. All this collaboration led to the idea of working with Vim at TWM to make a weaving which could act like a curtain, with shadows creating a moving composition within the folds of cloth. With the help of the WEFT participants, we discovered exactly how we would form our shadow puppet theatre. It was amazing to see the kinds of compositions and stories we could arrive at through simple materials and a lot of play. My favorite moment was when we discovered how the body could work in conjunction with the puppets to make more interesting narratives.

From this work we were able to create two Shadow puppet shows. One, at TWM in which the WEFT residents were able to see their puppets, costumes and stories come alive in a series of performances. And the second in the gardens of Schoolhouse which Vim and I, and various other performers put together as an ode to the end of summer. 

-Jo

WORKSHOPS WITH ENVISION UNLIMITED

A wolf, a feather, a car, a rain cloud, a lightning bolt, a flower: these are some of the shadow puppet representations that were created in collaboration with the artists at Envision.

These shadow forms found ways to move between object into character into setting into catalyst into inspiration for a micro drama to play out behind the curtain. Initially I think Jo and I were interested in finding ways to create elaborate long form stories within the workshop, which fell away when we realized the power of free association and free play.

There was so much joy and magic found in the mode of play that we all discovered together. The free flowing roles, moving between audience member or observer to puppeteer to narrator, is of particular importance and interest to me. We would switch out, a few of us huddled behind the curtain, passing puppets behind, trying some out, tossing ones we no longer had a connection with, bringing more in, and then taking a moment to become the observer. I think this transformation from performer to observer cultivated a lot of fun and ultimately joy! 

- Vim