Tracing a gesture made by Vikki Quill, of the calligraphic form, Mountain, I made this animation, Orientation.
I so enjoyed Vikki’s free, loose-limbed gestures that I made her dance to drums. The sound is of Jon Hizzard, playing with a group of people on Flinders Island. Jon made a series of musical responses to Antarctica in 2002, which can be found in some of the earlier animations.
This animation is not about a mountain, but about a pleasurable, rhythmic connection with the earth, suggested by Vikki’s gestures and Jon’s drumming sounds.
Bill Manhire, in his Introduction to The wide white page (2004), suggests there is room for more humour in the literature of Antarctica:
Perhaps some kind of comedy, even, may be possible.
Certainly there is room for fun.
The dancing dots and triangles were suggested by seeing an exhibition of gesturing hands. Burning luck, by Dygu Beykal, can be seen at Sydney’s blank_space gallery:
The exhibition “burning luck” includes a body of art works (sculpture, video and drawing) which explores the connections between the local and the global through hands, language and political gestures.
Drawings of hands gesturing were pinned on a wall. The hands had their palms market with henna dots.
As well as tracing Vikki’s body gesture with straight lines, I traced the hand she gestured with separately. I marked each hand position a black dot, and played with with these by layering and syncopation.
The triangles were formed as part of this play, by joining the dancing dots. The dots suggest snow drift, triangles ice.
Vikki’s Mountain gesture turned out to draw the ever-changing Antarctic environment.
She comments:
Progressing to dots and triangles is really interesting. As far as the mountain goes and calligraphy, I think of the mountain not as a solid thing but a mass of clods (dots) communicating like the cells in the body…I understand the difficulty of expressing groundedness in line animation. Dots as way of building mass is one way I approach both the lines of calligraphy and the bridge between ink and blood. I touched on that briefly at the workshop when I said they’d put calligraphy works under the microscope which revealed the make up of the ink being spots or dots. . so a calligraphic line is made up of millions of dots in a very real sense. (is that Pythagorean? point to line?)
Vikki