Witness Statements

In an age of colossal image over-production, where the visual, the communicating vessel of our times, exists as a kind of permanent, accumulating weather front pressing on daily experience, new making comes loaded. How does one balance the perennial desire for self-expression with the need for viable circulation, distinctive reception in a super-saturated environment? These concerns are only heightened by the extreme conditions of recent months, whether the pandemic's persistent sprawl or the undeniable confirmation of profound imbalance in the justice and equality of race and class experience. Animators are often trivialised as being psychologically predisposed to a kind of willed, voluntary lockdown - solitary, patient, obsessively focused, removed - but it is perhaps these very qualities that help them both to endure the precarity of our moment and to respond in ways that might be useful, pertinent. They can dwell, through the lens of that distinction, on relations - with self, others, the social and natural worlds. This selection of works (completed during this period and whose viewing is productively informed by the current crises) focuses on individuals, and their complex relationship with often challenging structures – familial or not – to consider and embody these concerns.