Edge of Frame presents a programme of experimental animation featuring a variety of approaches to collage and cut-out animation. Materials such as clothing, found photographs, books, maps, plants and off cuts of film footage are recontextualised and seen anew through tactile processes of animation, sometimes combining with drawn and painted animation, to reveal hidden stories, new connections and dazzling patterns. Dating from 1959 to 2018, these works forefront the surfaces and physicality of the materials in front of (and sometimes within) the camera, yet take us into the speculative zones of the imagination, unlocking memories, reveries and dreams, from the highly personal to the purely abstract.

Introduced by programme curator, Edwin Rostron.

For All Audiences
Josh Weissbach
2018 | 2’36 min | Colour | Digital

A trailer of an experiment searches for meaning in a mouldy montage. The detritus of the movie industry swims in organic material. Emulsion and its cracks, its crumbles, and its fades. Is it ready for all the audiences?

Giardini
Ira Vicari
2018 | 2 min | Colour | Digital

Thinking about the gardens I've been in.

Winners Bitch
Sam Gurry
2018 | 7 min | Colour | Digital

Inspired by a found archive on a doyenne of the dog competition world, Sam Gurry's animated documentary is a visually kinetic rumination on the many sacrifices it can take to be a woman of distinction.

Vera
Karen Yasinsky
2017 | 6’51 min | Colour | Digital

Vera is a character created over the time of animating the cobweb and thinking about Bix Beiderbecke’s song, Mississippi Mud. Additional music by Andrew Bern-stein; with Gillian Waldo.

Black Long Skirt
Hoji Tsuchiya
2010 | 8’57 min | Colour | Digital

A woman passes through the body of a man on a day when it is about to rain.

Mom's Clothes
Jordan Wong
2018 | 5’37 min | Colour | Digital

“A nonfiction reflection on being out of the closet. As a queer person of color, it's taken me a long time to be as comfortable as I am through navigating forms of intimacy, gender, and self worth. It doesn't always get better, but you're beautiful how-ever you decide to present, including the choice of garments you decide to wear.” – Jordan Wong

Miroir dans un pré
Ira Vicari
2017 | 2’42 min | Colour | Digital

Sun was beating, I saw myself in a mirror. Post-production: Atelier 105.

Look and Learn
Janie Geiser
2017 | 11’15 min | Colour & B/W | Digital

Look and Learn excavates the visual vocabulary we use to operate and construct the daily world. It explores the juxtaposition of two material image forms: visual instructions (assembly guides, photography manuals, maps, diagrams) and photographs - mainly a set of several 1950’s era elementary school group photographs. The visual instructions mimic maps in their hope of directing us to some-thing, or somewhere, perhaps to a better understanding of our world and how things work. 

Eyewash
Robert Breer
1959 | 3 min | Colour | 16mm

Organised confusion of live footage and animation. Colour of original added to by hand on each print.

Odds and Ends
Jane Conger Belson Shimane
1959 | 4 min | Colour | 16mm

Made from discarded footage from a local film lab and Shimane’s own animation sequences, using direct, painted-on-film techniques and stop-motion animation using cut-out paper. Upon the film winning the 1960 Creative Film Award, Shimane is said to have commented, “I just got high and put it together.”

Speak
John Latham
1962 | 10 min | Colour | 16mm

“(Latham’s) second attack on the cinema. Not since Len Lye’s films in the thirties has England produced such a brilliant example of animated abstraction. Speak burns its way directly into the brain. It is one of the few films about which it can truly be said, “it will live in your mind”.” – Raymond Durgnat.

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Material Fragments is one of three programmes curated by Edge of Frame for London International Animation Festival 2018, taking place at venues across London from 30 November to 9 December.

Edge of Frame aims to stimulate artistic discourse around experimental animation, focusing on work at the intersection of animation, experimental film and artists’ moving image. Beginning as a blog in 2013 and extending into screening events in 2016, it seeks to celebrate this incredibly rich and vibrant, yet often marginalised and hard to define art form. Edge of Frame is run by Edwin Rostron, a London-based artist, curator and tutor at the Royal College of Art.

More info: www.edgeofframe.co.uk