For three months, Julia Fernandez spent the hours between 8 a.m. and noon waiting for the right light to filter into her Brooklyn studio. Once the shared space was well lit, she swapped a grid of twelve ceramic tiles and took photos from above that would eventually be pieced together into the charming stop-motion animation: ‘Filthy.”
The music video for an acoustic song from Los Angeles-based Emory, Fernandez’s film cycles through 300 tiles that show a small rabbit jumping across the screen, children running and a spindly, line-drawn flower blooming and withering. Each carved character is contained within the grainy patchwork, which emphasizes the particularities of the medium through irregular edges and differences in the glazes. Combined with the physical manipulations required in stop-motion, the ceramic animation is a poetic ode to an unlikely combination of tactile media.
In a conversation with It’s nice thatsays Fernandez that she first fused the two after etching a small cup which also served as a zoetrope. This playful compilation also includes a rabbit and a flower and is a clear precursor to the techniques and characters that shine in ‘Dirt’. “Seeing a material that was supposed to be still and permanent start to move felt like magic, as if I had actually cracked a code to create movement that would otherwise be impossible,” she said.
See more of the artist’s ceramic animations at Instagram.
