Brontë Automata

The Yorkshire Post carries a piece about Lisa Slater's automata, particularly her Brontë automata:

Lisa Slater's automata pieces combine her eye for the unusual and the humorous with her love of handcrafting wood at her Hebden Bridge workshop. She talks to Stephanie Smith.
Meet the Brontë sisters as you have never seen them before, in the form of fascinating, if slightly eerie, small wooden automata models to wind and watch as they read their novels to their aching hearts' content. "I have always thought I should make them because they are only over the hill," says automata maker Lisa Slater, whose workshop, at Northlight Art Studios in Hebden Bridge, is only eight miles away from the Brontës' Haworth home by foot.
"I started with the idea of making little wooden folk art dolls —penny dolls or farthing dolls — so I bought myself a small wood turn-ing lathe," she says. "When you look at that picture that Branwell painted of his sisters, they look like kind of wooden people."
Influenced by historical craft and folk art, a love of animals and humour, Lisa creates simple mechanical automata pieces, many of them bespoke commissions, each unique, and working in harmony with the woods they are crafted from.
The Brontë automatons are wooden doll-like characters that turn and perform simple movements — turning her head and lifting a copy of Wuthering Heights, in Emily's case. She encases them in old wooden sewing machine drawers, which used to be plentiful when there was a trend for putting hardwood table tops on old iron sewing machines, but are harder to come by now. "They are beautiful and they have their own character," says Lisa.
She is making them for private clients and to sell at Hawksbys Gallery at Haworth (the sisters sell individually at £345 each, although Anne is less popular), but she also has plans to place all three sisters within an old round station clock case she has found. The look of the sisters is based on Branwell Brontë's famous portrait. "He went crackers and painted himself out," she says. "I intend to put them in there reading their books and I'm going to have Branwell on a disc so he rotates in and rotates out behind them." (Stephanie Smith)