Fabric Film Strip #1, 2023

Co-Created by Adela Cardona Puerta, Jennifer Lawson, Molly McLain, Austin Roch, Mikey Rogers, and Charlie Wilcox

As part of Portland Textile Month 2023: Mixed Identities

This animation is the result of my first iteration at facilitating a collaborative animation workshop centered around a shared project space of a fabric film strip. Inspired by the lineage of direct animation created by Len Lye, Norman McLaren, Harry Smith, Rose Bond, and others, in which the animator works directly on celluloid film rather than using the film to photograph work on other media, I set about re-inverting this relationship once again, creating a film strip in textiles that could be ‘directly’ animated upon and screened through a theoretical fabric film projector.

In doing so, my goal is to create a physical object that opens up the animation process to a larger, more diverse group of people, operating simultaneously and collaboratively. Basically, I am asking: what if we reconstituted the skill of animation to resemble the craft community of a knitting circle? To do so, I screenprinted a repeating background pattern onto a piece of cotton that I then cut and sewed into a ~40 foot loop. In using fabric, this opens up the animation space to a number of different skillsets: embroidery, quilting, illustration, painting, printing, written art, and more.