animation – EMMA NEUBERG

Painting in Motion: Colour, Animation and the V&A

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…

Drapes: Painting, Power and the Architecture of Cloth

Drapes was my first large-scale installation, commissioned by curator Hannah Rose for the Mirror Gallery at the University of Plymouth in 2016 to launch its Textiles Season, which also featured British designers Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons of Timorous Beasties and Kit Kemp.

Rather than hanging paintings on walls, I wanted the paintings to become the walls.

Measuring 3.5 × 4 × 5 metres (11.5 × 13 × 16 feet), Drapes consisted of twenty suspended textile elements. Using satin polyester as a volumetric medium, the installation transformed the gallery into an immersive environment in which colour, pattern and material occupied architectural space. Each element employed repeating…

Drawing with the Museum: Glass, Pattern and the V&A

One of my favourite workshops at the V&A took place in the Clore Gallery as part of Design the World, a programme inviting children and their carers to use the Museum’s collections as starting points for their own designs.

For this session, we began in the V&A’s Glass Gallery.

Rather than simply looking at the objects as historical artefacts, I encouraged participants to notice what glass does: how light passes through it, how forms distort, how reflections multiply and how colour and shadow alter according to the position of the viewer.

Back in the Clore Gallery, these observations became drawings made on Samsung tablets using Autodesk SketchBook. Lines could be repeated, reflected and reorganised into new digital patterns, allowing an encounter with an historical object to become the starting point for an entirely contemporary image.

Looking as making…

Detours: Painting, Animation and the Art of Changing Direction

In 2012, an artist residency at Chelsea College of Art through the national AA2A (Artists Access to Art Colleges) programme gave me an opportunity to develop my digital animation practice, drawing on historical textile designs from the 1920s in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s national collections.

The residency led to Detours, an exhibition at Wimbledon Space, London, from 3 to 25 May 2012. It became an important moment in my development, bringing together painting, textiles and moving images within a contemporary fine art gallery, while also initiating professional relationships that would continue into later projects.

Looking back, I find the exhibition’s title particularly appropriate. What began as an opportunity to learn new digital techniques became a series of encounters that changed the direction of my practice.

From Historical Pattern to Moving Image

My proposal for the AA2A residency was to investigate the possibilities of digital animation through historical textile design.

I had long been interested in how patterns generate visual movement through repetition, symmetry, rotation and colour. Textile designs can create remarkably complex rhythms within a stationary surface. I wanted to explore what might happen when those relationships were released from their fixed positions and allowed to move through time…