A key formal development during my MFA resulted from a meeting with Professor Daniel Jolliffe in which he suggested slowing the movie rate so the viewer would be able to see what I saw on the frames – the lush textures, the gestural marks, and the sensuous forms. Slowing them down was a paradigm shift. It redirected the focus of the animation from trying to read it as story to perceiving visual images changing over time. Suddenly the very short, looping animations operated by way of the compelling nature of the images themselves to generate sensation and feeling. For example, the needle puncturing a resistant material and the chair doing a cartwheel generated for me a visceral feeling and a haptic sensation.

Mimicking realism was not my goal but I happened to begin the drawings with figurative (or representational) elements. Including figurative imagery introduced a recognizable subject by default. While I could have argued that the figures I chose to draw were in fact meant to be read as abstract forms and had no value as signifiers of something in the real world, that would not have been true. I may have been choosing the figure elements intuitively rather than deliberately, but they were certainly not abstract to me.