Figure maker

Dan Lavender

A living builder whose work goes as heavily equipped as anything being made now.

Figures 1
Photographs 31
Trade name dlavender.com

Jimmy Vee's first-hand record has Lavender living and working; his website is bot-blocked rather than dead, which is why it looks abandoned from the outside. He runs a joint line called Inspired Worx with Bill Nelson that appears on both their sites.

The figure photographed here has a specific history. The collection sent Lavender a casting of Cecil Wigglenose II — a McElroy face — with an explicit instruction that the result was not to be a McElroy replica: no cradle, no typewriter keys, but Lavender's own wooden head stick and his own style throughout, in whatever time he had.

The mechanics

The Cecil Wigglenose II figure carries all-around moving eyes with eyelids that follow and blink, raising and lowering eyebrows, side-to-side self-centering eyes, wiggling ears, an upper-lip sneer and a lower jaw, on a carved wooden head stick.

Status Living recorded first-hand by Jimmy Vee, which outranks any web source — maker websites in this field routinely outlive the maker

The figures

31 photographs across 1 cataloged object. Each object is one entry in the register — where a character name covers two physical figures, they stay two entries, because the character outlives the object more often than the record admits.