My relationship with animation began long before I thought of it as digital practice.
In 1992, I spent time in Prague with the creative team around Czech filmmaker and animator Jan Švankmajer. Back in London during the 1990s, I made small animations by hand at the Film-makers’ Co-op in Primrose Hill, moving pieces of paper frame by frame.
Nearly twenty years later, those experiments resurfaced in a very different form at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
By then paper had become pixels. Photoshop and Illustrator had entered my studio and paintings that had previously existed as fixed arrangements of colour could move.
In January 2015, Alex Flowers of the V&A’s Digital Programmes team invited me to lead the first pilot session of the museum’s Samsung Digital Classroom. Writing about the workshop for the V&A, he illustrated the programme with three of my animated works—Inheritance 1 (2010), Vasarely Blends 2 (2013) and Exploded Vase (2013)—and described my practice as exploring “geometric colour dynamics in digital and analogue media.”
I like that description looking back.
The distinction between analogue and digital had never seemed particularly important to me. What interested me was what colour could do—and what might happen when painting began to move.
From Slow Textiles to the V&A
The route to the V&A had begun several years earlier.
In 2007, while working alongside the Textiles Environment Design research team at Chelsea College of Art & Design, I started the Slow Textiles Group. I had been a Visiting Lecturer at art colleges since 1994, but I wanted to create a more open environment in which some of the ideas circulating through art and design research could move beyond the university.
I began hiring Gracelands Café in Kensal Green and running workshops there. Students came, but so did members of the public and colleagues from Chelsea. Research, teaching and making began to overlap.
One of those colleagues was the textile designer Melanie Bowles. Melanie and I spent a great deal of time discussing digital textile design and what we loosely thought of as slow and fast methodologies: the relationship between hand processes, digital technologies, participation and production.
Melanie suggested that we propose courses to the V&A.
The museum said yes.
In 2010 we began teaching together there, initially with Fast/Slow, a course developed in response to Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes. We subsequently devised workshops alongside V&A exhibitions and collections, moving between drawing, pattern, hand processes and digital production.
Eventually this collaboration became The People’s Print.
Participatory Design
We described our teaching methodology as Participatory Design.
Rather than demonstrating a technique for people simply to reproduce, we wanted participants to become active designers. The museum collection might provide the starting point, but what emerged from it belonged to them.
A historical object could become a drawing. A drawing could become a motif. A motif could be repeated, mirrored, recoloured and transformed digitally into pattern. The pattern could then leave the screen and return to material form.
This movement between physical and digital processes fascinated me.
Melanie’s knowledge of digital textile design encouraged me to become increasingly fluent in Photoshop and Illustrator. Her book Digital Textile Design was an important presence during this period. What began partly as something fun for me to do gradually became another strand of my artistic practice.
I began digitising my pastel paintings, separating and repeating elements, changing their scale and colour and eventually setting them into motion.
The computer was not replacing painting.
It was giving me another way of thinking through it.
From Screen to Cloth
An important part of The People’s Print methodology was completing the journey from digital image to physical object.
We worked with digital fabric-printing bureaux, including Contrado, so that designs created during workshops could become finished textiles such as silk scarves.
I became fascinated by the moment when the image left the screen.
Before the individual designs were separated into finished objects, I could see them together as long runs of printed cloth. Colour and pattern continued across the fabric, but the material itself could fold, hang, billow and drape.
Looking back, I can see how important that was.
I had already begun thinking about painting beyond the conventional picture plane with the Billboard Skirts, but these long digitally printed lengths suggested another possibility. Painting could become continuous. It could leave the rectangular frame, acquire scale and occupy architecture.
Several years later, that possibility would emerge much more fully in Drapes.
Drawing with the Museum
As the V&A’s digital programme developed, Samsung became a sponsor of the Samsung Digital Classroom, bringing tablet technology directly into our workshops.
One of my favourite sessions involved taking the tablets into the V&A’s Jewellery Gallery with a group of teenagers. Photography wasn’t permitted, so instead they drew directly from the gemstones on the screens.
The results were immediate and extraordinarily beautiful.
I loved the paradox of it. We were using a new digital technology, but rather than distancing the students from the museum objects, it made them look more closely. Colour, geometry, reflection and the structure of the gems had to be observed and translated through the hand.
The museum object became a drawing almost instantaneously.
I also used digital technologies with other V&A audiences, including adoptive families in the Clore learning spaces. The work eventually led to another strand of teaching with children and schools. After one of my workshops, Alex Flowers wrote to tell me that he had passed my details to Cara Williams in the Schools team:
“Cara in our schools team wants to create pattern design workshops for schools and was looking for a designer to work with so she should be in touch about them.”
I subsequently worked with children using the V&A’s digital pattern-making tools, taking objects in the permanent collections as starting points for new designs. The Islamic collections were particularly rich territory: historic geometries could be observed and drawn, then transformed through contemporary digital tools into inventive new patterns.
Again, the process was one of translation rather than copying.
Museum object became drawing.
Drawing became pattern.
Pattern became invention.
The Samsung connection also travelled beyond the museum. The People’s Print was then based at Somerset House, where I was introduced to Samsung to discuss possible creative projects in the United States. Like so many encounters during this period, a teaching project had begun to open into another network of people, places and possibilities.
Painting in Motion
Alongside this teaching, my own digital experiments became increasingly complex.
Inheritance 1 (2010), Vasarely Blends 2 (2013) and Exploded Vase (2013) grew from my interest in colour relationships, symmetry, repetition and movement. Some began with my own pastel paintings, which I digitised and transformed through Photoshop and Illustrator.
Animation allowed me to introduce another element that a static painting could only imply: time.
Colours could arrive and disappear. Symmetries could form and dissolve. A composition could have one state and then another.
I wasn’t particularly interested in digital technology for its own sake. I was interested in what it allowed me to discover about painting.
When Alex Flowers featured these three animated works on the V&A website in 2015, he described them as exploring “geometric colour dynamics in digital and analogue media.”
That movement between the analogue and digital had become fundamental to the way I worked.
A Practice Moving in Both Directions
Looking back, I don’t see a straightforward progression from hand-making to digital technology.
The movement was always in both directions.
Paper became pixels.
Pastel paintings became animations.
Museum objects became digital patterns.
Digital patterns became printed silk.
Printed silk became something that could fold and drape through space.
And eventually digital animation returned to the gallery alongside physical paintings, stitched works and the suspended architecture of Drapes.
Teaching was part of this process rather than something separate from it. The workshops gave me a public laboratory in which drawing, colour, pattern, technology and material could continually encounter one another. Participants discovered new ways of making, but their experiments also made me see possibilities in my own work.
That enquiry is still continuing.
I am now interested in what happens when another technology enters this process: artificial intelligence. I plan to use AI to generate repeat patterns from my paintings, extending the conversation between the handmade image, digital transformation, repetition and printed cloth that began for me decades ago.
I don’t see this as replacing painting any more than Photoshop, Illustrator or animation replaced it.
Each offers another way for a painting to travel.
A painting can become a pattern. A pattern can become cloth. Cloth can become architecture. An image can become movement. And now a painting might generate families of patterns and variations that I could not have anticipated when I made the original.
What else can a painting become?
Perhaps this is what I now find most interesting about those years at the V&A.
I thought I was teaching people how to make patterns.
At the same time, I was learning how my paintings might move.
V&A Digital Programme
Digital Print for Fashion and Interior Design
Samsung Digital Classroom
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
31 January 2015
Led by Dr Emma Neuberg as the first pilot session of the V&A’s Samsung Digital Classroom.
Featured works:
Inheritance 1, 2010
Vasarely Blends 2, 2013
Exploded Vase, 2013
V&A article by Alex Flowers, Learning and Interpretation, 29 January 2015.
Discover more in The Digital Classroom.