UNEARTH
A Series of Explorations Based in Nature
I've always been a slow hiker -- I'm far more focused on what's covering the ground than the ground I've covered. These animated musings began with an attempt to bring the outdoors into the studio, and lately reflect a determination to bring the studio outdoors. An animator's task is to create and control movement, but in these collaborations with nature, I'm seeking to unearth motion I couldn't have invented myself.
While at a residency in Finland, I found myself wrapped up in the emergent shapes of Scots Pine bark when more than one piece resembling New Jersey caught my eye. The forest floor was covered in these delicate pieces, surround by flaky orange bark. I imagined a metamorphic replacement frame animation, but found them to have an almost liquid quality while animating them under the camera. The soundtrack was recorded using tree bark.
Strata-cut is a particular method of animation in which the artist creates a long log of clay, internally packed and loaded with varying imagery, that is then sliced in thin sheets and shot frame by frame, revealing the internal motion. In this series, I applied the same concept to logs, stumps, and branches,
traveling through the trees and revealing their internal motions.
I've a far-too-large collection of leaves. These aspen leaves were all gathered at Pando, a clonal aspen colony in Utah once thought to be the Earth's largest organism.
My residency in Finland overlapped with the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year. In an invented ritual of worship, I shot a 24-frame cycle of hand drawn animation hourly over the course of the 24 hours of the Solstice, using a hybrid animation stand/sundial made from found materials.
One of my rituals while at the residency in Finland was a daily sunset walk to the lake, past this field of dandelions. Just one week in, a windy night had wiped the field clean.
What if I could put them back together, piece by piece?
