All Hat, No Cattle

A collection of poetry & excerpts from the world of Welts the Clown. Taking the form of a cowboy-clown figure, WELTS is an entity created by Llewelyn , our protagonist, in a moment of desperation and resistance to colonial power. With the help of this grant, I would be able to take this character, born out of virtual performance, and expand it into a deeper and more complex story: a short film that explores his backstory and the absurdist, folklorish world that he inhabits. Unsettling and unpredictable by nature, he is meant to inhabit the contradictions of American mythmaking and identity.Captured from his rainforest origins and eventually assimilating to the life of a rodeo clown mirrors the historical path of Caribbean migrants, representing an intergenerational, spiritual focus. The absurdism emerges through the film's mixed‑media construction: some sequences are animated, others use captured performance, and analog textures appear alongside digital environments. The character's presence is sometimes grounded and sometimes destabilized by the world around him. This friction visually expresses the instability of the myths the film interrogates, in other words, it allows the visual language to further emphasize the contradictions the character is forced to navigate.