ILLUMINATE. 2020. Mixed media animation.
Created in the 2019-2020 bushfire season after an intense personal brush with the destructive nature of fire, Illuminate communicates the artist’s despair at the seeming inevitability that climate change, if left unchecked, will continue to wreck havoc on our physical landscape, as well as our internal ones. The image’s use of contrast and light symbolises the need for society to adopt new “illuminated” practices and policies that contrast with current destructive habits that contribute to extreme weather events such as the 2020 bushfires.
2023 - Spark Festival; deLight featured artist.
On Process:
Illuminate was the first standalone mixed media animation piece I created when I was first interested in using illustrative moving images to tell stories. In late 2019 and early 2020, Australia was burning. The bushfire season was long and intense, due to a very long and nasty drought, and I felt very deeply the despair of the land. As a mother, I felt this more than I had thought possible. Would my children be constantly unsafe due to these extreme weather events? After a personal brush with the intensity of fire, and being absorbed into further traumatic experiences of friends who lost their homes, I wrote a treatment for a short animated film from the perspective of a mother-daughter relationship. This piece was the first exploration into moving-image storytelling I created and perhaps, one day, I will revisit this treatment and execute the story in full.
To create this piece, I painted a landscape in gouache and then digitally manipulated it in Photoshop to alter colour and light. I added cut paper collage elements and created a fire loop with pastel drawing on paper. The texture and rough nature of the pastel and the imperfect animation creates an intensity that aims to capture the intense, unpredictable nature of fire.
Gouache painting, painted paper collage, digital collage, pastel drawing, photography, digital manipulation.
