A Foundation - My Work/Inital Animations

                                                  still from 'the encounter' by Agnieszka Kucharko

looking at the New Contemporaries one if the artist's who i found the most interesting and relevant to my own work was the video piece by Agnieszka Kucharko,  the piece was called 'the encounter' - the whole video is about 11 minutes long, if I'm  honest i didn't watch the whole video, i was just completely captured by a sequence that was only a couple of minutes long of foot steps down a dark corridor, it was the simplictity and rhythm of the foot steps that really interested me. it was just that really basic image, something that's not overly out if the ordinary, but just really captured my attention for those few minutes. its something that started me thinking about elements of my own work, and id love to be able to try and re-create that kind of image that will hold people's attention just for a few moments. that simplicity of moment that will keep your attention in a way that i suppose is quite superficial in that fact that your watching a very simple moving object - that doesn't demand too much thought process, but that's in its simplicity is completely compelling and mesmerising. hopefully i can try to recreate that in my own work.

as the project progressed i began to realise that the project for me had become much more about the process of the cross stitch, and really wanted to start exploring that idea. becoming more aware of what and why i was doing, and try to prevent me from just mechanically producing these bits of embroidery with no more thought input, almost more for my sanity more that anything.

and so with that in mind i began to experiment with animation, playing with the process process of the stitching, the way it was so time consuming, and the way it developed stitch by stitch, i had however never done anything like animation before, and as a result the little initial videos aren't really the best thing in the world;

the above animation is the first i attempted; there was a subsequent and very similar animation that had the stitches progressing from the bottom left hand corner - but looking at it afterwards, i decided that there needed to be more curiosity, to make people want to watch the animation in the first place. which resulted in the bellow (unfinished) animation; the animation is of pillow lace, an image i found in green book in the beginning of the animation.