Features category

Sukhdev Sandhu on Portraiture in Contemporary Animation

The following transcript is taken from animate!’s three-part series of screening & discussion evenings in Spring 2006 at the National Portrait Gallery, London, entitled Tracing the Contours: Portraiture and Place in Contemporary Animation, investigating the unique way in which animation, the manipulated moving image, can amplify notions of portraiture.

The third evening Private Eyes: Portraits Inside [...]

Iain Sinclair on Portaiture in Contemporary Animation

The following transcript is taken from animate!’s three-part series of screening & discussion evenings in Spring 2006 at the National Portrait Gallery, London, entitled Tracing the Contours: Portraiture and Place in Contemporary Animation, investigating the unique way in which animation, the manipulated moving image, can amplify notions of portraiture.

The second evening Route Masters: Portraits in [...]

AS Byatt on Portraiture in Contemporary Animation

The following transcript is taken from animate!’s three-part series of screening & discussion evenings in Spring 2006 at the National Portrait Gallery, London, entitled Tracing the Contours: Portraiture and Place in Contemporary Animation, investigating the unique way in which animation, the manipulated moving image, can amplify notions of portraiture.

The first evening Face to Place: Portraits [...]

Bringing the Distance Close

How to photograph the wind? How to embody pure motion in a still image? How to portray the invisible? The latter, of course, makes its presence felt through its brief tenure, if there is one, in the realm of the seen. Similarly, motion is most accurately encountered in its alignment with the nominally fixed. In [...]

Alfred Wallis and the Driftwood Dream

So through the eyes love attains the heart:
For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,
And the eyes go reconnoitering
For what it would please the heart to possess.
Guiraut de Borneilh (1138 - c 1200AD).

A man lives and then he dies. He is at sea and then on land. He has a wife who dies. And [...]

Drawings in Flight

Desire paths in Dryden Goodwin’s Flight

‘Only connect!… Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted… Live in fragments no longer.’ E.M. Forster Howards End

For nearly fifteen years, via film, video, drawing, photography and installation, Dryden Goodwin has investigated the implications of sustained looking in a series of works that have, with [...]

The Artists, The Animators

The Animators exhibition, at Angel Row Gallery Nottingham, Spacex Gallery Exeter and Ferens Art Gallery Hull, features seven UK artists who make a variety of different kinds of artworks, including paintings, sculptures, photographs and live events. What they have in common is that they all also make animations.

The exhibition is timely. Computer software packages [...]

Why Animation Matters

“I am writing, here, as a kind of casualty: someone who was seduced by this strange work, and has yet to recover. I have come to see that this is perhaps all I ever write about.” Ian Penman

Animation matters. It matters…

Because everything is going, is slipping beneath the waves, is starving or burning and maimed [...]

A Lisbon

“His language of images makes it possible to understand familiar things without their ceasing to be unfamiliar. Simile brings distant things near while at the same time freezing them in an image protected from the ravaging force of habit.” Peter Szondi, from Walter Benjamin’s City Portraits.

The wings in the chest, do we feel them lift [...]

Punishment Park

90 minutes, 1970, US, directed by Peter Watkins

Before one even considers the form and content of his singularly powerful body of work, the remarkable oeuvre of internationalist film-maker Peter Watkins is testament to the many inspirational qualities this committed artist has displayed, over four decades and in the face of concerted institutional and media hostility. [...]