HANNAH GEE
Artist Statement
Animation is for me, the physical, material perception of time.
My practice integrates traditional sculptural processes and digital media with stop-motion animation and projection installation. Focusing on museum objects and ancient iconography, human perceptions of time inform the material and conceptual foundation for my work, where ancient lives are reimagined through a contemporary medium. As objects that are simultaneously fixed in time, yet traverse time and space by being preserved and reimagined, objects from antiquity are particularly interesting to animate.
There is an undeniable illusion of movement that permeates classical sculpture and painting. Creating the illusion of movement in a pre-existing object or image is a complex navigation of material characteristics. It involves as much careful observation of what is seen and preserved as it does imagination of what is lost and what might have been. Movement is imagined, but also inferred by the shapes, colours and lines used by the ancient artist. This makes the experience of animation both physical and cognitive; a dance between study and improvisation.
Through observational drawing, one can almost feel the human force used to create the original object; mimicking fine motor skills of Hellenistic hands and Medieval fingers. Combining processes of drawing and digital media renders the many objects of study (two-dimensional drawings) into fluid sequences that trick the brain, suspend disbelief and inhabit new contexts through projection and online platforms. When animated artefacts are projected, they can become larger than life, spill over different physical textures, or play with a viewer’s associative visual memory in a contrasting environment.
Drawing and animating images from the ancient Mediterranean past has had transformative effects on my art practice, enhanced by my encounter with the historical span and intricacy of Cyprus archaeology in the Paphos Theatre Excavation of the University of Sydney during the 2016 dig season.
The animated sequences are inspired directly by objects excavated from the Paphos Theatre, as well as materials and tools used in the archaeological process. Grid paper and trowels express as much agency in retelling the past as the artefacts do: removing earth, revealing scale and estimating truth.
Hannah Gee, May 2017.
Biography
Hannah Gee graduated with Honours in Visual Art in 2014 at the University of Wollongong, Australia with an experimental practice encompassing observational drawing, sculpture and animation. Hannah Gee was the University of Wollongong Artist in Residence at the Australian Institute of Archaeology in Athens in 2015. She has exhibited widely in Sydney and Wollongong since 2009, and her work in animation has been shown in the Australian Museum, Sydney (2016). Her solo exhibition Love or Nothing // Erotas I Tipota, was held at Project Contemporary Artspace, Wollongong in 2017.
Animations from the exhibition ‘Travellers from Australia’ (2017)
Animation Stills
