Stop Motion

Animation: To fill with life. 

It is abundantly clear in my stop motion work that I have no formal training in animation. I come to stop motion by way of live puppetry, years and years of physically moving handmade figures of various sizes and kinds through actual (usually cramped) physical space. I can't physically handle the big puppets anymore but stop motion has become a happy alternative.

In the late 70's when I began, puppetry was a very small niche on the sidelines of live theater and early television; I've enjoyed watching as the form has shifted and changed, becoming part of the visual vocabulary of the culture. I admire and appreciate the work of artists like Nick Park, Wes Anderson, and Tim Burton, and I look forward to each new film as it appears after years of painstaking work on the part of hundreds of amazing, artists, editors, and animators. The films they create, with their flawless natural movement and perfect miniature worlds, is astonishing in its detail and exactitude. Viewers fall into them and are taken over by them, experiencing the stories as an alternate reality.

Even so, I remain fascinated by early stop motion. The awkward, almost-but-not-quite reality of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and Gumby – their object-ness coming to life – still blindsides me and makes me look in a way that the newer, shinier animation films don't. It's that sense of an object coming alive that I'm trying to catch in my own work. My puppets are puppets – I want them to be - and they inhabit the same world I do, so their jerky, stuttery movements and mismatched scale are anachronisms. In my more recent work, the flicker of natural light in natural landscapes suggests small stories that you might catch sight of from the corner of your eye if only you knew where to look. 

We see so many computer-generated and computer-enhanced images around us every day – watching real, physical objects tell a story with all of their rough edges exposed is rare. And I think it might be important. There is beauty in the rough edges if you know where to look. Rough edges don't slide over you and slip away, they catch on things. For me, they open up another way to see.