EXPERIMENTS IN STOP MOTION

My grandfather died when I was very young. I never got to know him, which is a shame, because I think we would have gotten along. There were a lot of interesting things about him: he was born in 1914 (that’s a long time ago!!) and was a paratrooper in WWII who was (perhaps) at D-Day. He had a lot of odd jobs throughout his life after The War. One was as a cartoonist during the early years of Looney Tunes.

I like experimenting with new mediums, and without much preparation I decided to try my hand at stop motion, first with collage in my movie The Loneliest People on Earth, and then with fabric.

One of the things I love most about textiles is that I am engaging with the fabric the entire time. Whether I’ve dunk fabric in the creek or the sweat from my fingers as I sew gives it new creases, the way the fabric interacts with me and my environment means that I get to watch the fabric change.

I like the idea that a piece of art is meant to hold different meaning depending on the way you see it (as a tapestry or a little video). It’s exciting to think of things that bridge the physical-virtual experience not by trying to make them feel the same but by embracing those differences.

Stop motion mixes all sorts of time regimes: ancient techniques of embroidery and collage, a 1940s-esque attention to editing an individual frame, and modern technology (Canva!) that lets me bring the thing to life.

For my lovely friend Susannah! This is from her favorite home video of her parents moving into their first house. (Sep 2024)

Happiness is the Hardest Pill to Swallow (Jan 2024) Cotton.

This was my first fabric stop-motion experiment. It’s one of the largest pieces I’ve made to date, which was an exciting challenge though something to consider is that if your walls are shorter than the thing you made, you might not have anywhere to put it...

It was also one of the first times I intentionally incorporated poetry into my tapestry. I think the fact the video moves so fast made it a comfortable place to try that - you can’t even read what I wrote! Though that was the point, I’ll single out the words anyway, in case you’re like, what does it mean? Why does he eat his shadow self?? Why does he hate happiness??

Who does it serve
and whose selling it?
I crave it - I do -
I’m meant to
but never for long
it twists sour in me eventually.
Sweet pill
seeking to lull me
make me comfortable
and smooth.
Happiness is the hardest
pill to swallow
down my throat
scraping my esophagus
choking me on its way
to my heart.
I fear it will find
no space there
so resist, resist
and SPIT THE THING OUT!

Taking inspiration from some amazing multi-media artists, I wanted to make a video physical and have it interact with fabric in some way.

Tala Schlossberg makes these incredible little videos that I could watch all day. I’m not sure of her methods exactly, but it seems that she prints videos and then draws, paints, or some how physically manipulates them.

Margarita Brum is an artist from Uruguay who uses embroidery and collage to transform historic photos. I love the way her art places emotion into otherwise static historical moments.

With these two in mind, I made the following videos. 1. take video ; 2. screenshot video every half second; 3. print out each frame; 4. apply to fabric; 5. scan each ‘page’; 6. frame by frame, add to a video

Leap! Collage and scrap fabric, embroidery floss. (May 2024)
Thanks Avery for leaping large.

Ox. Collage and scrap fabric, markers.

PATCHWORK ARCHIVE