Experimental Animation
Grace Emily Manning
Grace Emily Manning is from Kent, UK.
Grace Emily’s first animated short A Sloborious Tale of Pupa was screened at the Whitechapel Gallery after graduating from BA Performance Design and Practice at Central Saint Martins in 2014. From her background in spatial design and collaborative work, Grace Emily has nurtured an interdisciplinary and expanded personal practice driven by environmentalism, at the core of which is her experimental moving image work.
Grace Emily was awarded the Sally Goldsworthy Bursary Prize by Discover Children's Story Centre in 2016 for her experimental story telling and handcraft world building. Grace Emily has directed dancers and musicians, devised and facilitated workshops and in 2019 Red List Mother, a large scale sculpture, was exhibited at Glastonbury Festival supported by The Park design team.
In 2018 she co-curated Nucleations: Laid of the Gravid, exhibiting her work in Deptford, London which led her to be chosen as an exhibiting artist at Cyclic Matter | Matéria Cíclica; a not-for-profit organisation in the West Coast of Portugal which provides platforms, tools and strategies for a transition towards a more ecocentric culture. Her work will be presented in Portugal when the Covid 19 outbreak is under control.
Grace Emily Manning mimics the hurt and healing in our natural world in profound reverence to the ecosystem that being is.
Manning is a soul giver, a pagan bio-mimetic creator; and she looks to tell the kinds of stories that can be choreographed as poetic vignettes of movement and sensitive interactions between creatures and worlds, considering the species and the interdependence between them. This earth which we retrieve, forage, material from, provides Grace Emily with organic and inorganic matter to animate an intimate dialogue between artist and material which revives and renews the relationship between land and being. And alike tending the land, Grace tends a systemic unity: the artist, the being, the species, the spirit, the land but also the technology behind the working of this complex that is our life. The magic secrets we can't see are there, as her work is charged with unseen research.
With a background in performance design, Grace Emily Manning moves through media fluently, it being live action film, sculpture, animation or large scale drawings that enable the viewer to tune in with her visions. The emotions of a place are paced by the scientist in her, but uttered by the powerful visual language she uses to birth the stories we urgently need to action. She captures the shamanistic spirit of care, empathy and unity in the spectrum between earth and species, and her surrealistic pieces show the imagination and ecological knowledge of the sci-fi eco-machine paradigm.
www.cyclicmatter.org
Statement photograph by Thomas Martin
SQ Swansula Quartz 2099 portal
SQ Swansula Quartz 2099 capsule
SQ Swansula Quartz 2099 anthropologically explores the concept of rewilding, as a process of awakening, healing, sacrifice and readaptation.
Swansula is an eco-science fiction drawn from an existing landscape Swanscombe Peninsula; a biodiverse triangle of marshland hugged by the River Thames in Kent currently threatened by a multi-billion pound development The London Resort.
The world of Swansula manifests through a multimedia mosaic of works, framed within a ecoactivist fantasy future to explore and expose the environmental issues surrounding the site today; presenting an alternative vision for the landscape to one driven by capitalism that harms its fragile wetland ecology.
Swansula process documentation follows the works below.
Medium:
performance, moving image, sculpture, painting, drawing, soundSize:
multimedia works, detailed individually“To heal Swansula, we have to rewire our minds and we have to rewild our hearts”
Medium:
moving imageSize:
3.57m
LUNMES Lunasaws Under New Moons Eve Summer 2045
LUNMES 2045
LUNMES 2045
LUNMES 2045
Medium:
ink, card board, whitewood spruce, galvanised steel clout nailSize:
120cm x 80cm x 12cm framed
Ecomaton Poto and Lunasaw Maya
Ecomaton Poto and Lunasaw Maya — Agar based bioplastic dyed with chlorella, recycled metal, linen dyed with weld, madder and blackberry, recycled textile, defunct machine parts | 120cm x 140cm x 50cm
Ecomaton Poto is a rewilding machine, measuring tide level, wind speed and water PH; grazing on river weed which is churned into raw matter to be processed as biomaterial by the Lunasaws.
Developed through technical model, puppet and material making support by Sophie Perkins.
Miniature electronics support from Mike Faulkner.
Medium:
moving image, multimedia sculptureSize:
detailed individuallySound Design, Composed and Produced by Shiv Pattni
shivpattnimusic@gmail.com | Instagram @shivshivshivshiv
Synthesizer - Ryan Crooks | ryan@simplepiec.es
Vocal - Alice Aires
Additional Vocals - Rita Pattni, Varsana Pattni
Medium:
moving imageSize:
4.20m
SV Swansula Vision 2085 — graphite, lining paper, chipboard 60cm x 180cm
SV 2085
SV 2085
SV 2085
SV 2085
Medium:
drawing, moving imageSize:
detailed individually
Reanimating landscape
The Swansula Collection is a speculative archive created in Thway, Swansula in the 24th Century, that will exist both physically and digitally.
I imagine the digital archive as a tool to explore and reanimate landscape post Anthropocene, a tactile and visceral way to scan and connect to the environment, its ecology and relics of the human imagination.
I am looking for collaborators to realise the digital Swansula Collection, to explore and experiment with sculpture and stop-motion animation in augmented reality.
EP Ecomaton Phanti 1:6 scale model 2079
Work in progress, now part of the Swansula Collection archive.
The sculpture was due to be animated in stop-motion and layered onto live action footage captured from the landscape; speculative surveillance to be projected within a sculptural installation, which was my initial final work.
The project then evolved due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Developed through technical model, puppet and material making support by Sophie Perkins.
Miniature electronics by Mike Faulkner
Fabrication Assistants -
Thomas Humphreys, Megan Dupont, Hannah Miller, Hannah Bhatti, Abigail Lindon
Medium:
Beetroot, blackberry and madder root bioplastic, aluminium, silver, copper, brass, rose fibre, natural rubber, linen dyed with weld, recycled textile, found plastic, recycled OHP lensSize:
120cm x 50cm x 150cmWith love and thanks to Animation class of 2020, who all have supported and fed this work every step of the way.
With special thanks to
Joe King, David Crump, Bunny Schendler, Ian Gouldstone, Daniel Saul, Edwin Roston, Suzanne Buchan, Betsy Dadd, Tim Webb, Sophie Perkins, Thomas Martin, Guy Nesfield, Hugh Gordon
And to the marshes, for unconditional support and inspiration.