ARCHIVES, COLLAGE AND CHAOS: the films of Joan Ashworth and Laurie Hill
16.30 on Saturday 20th June at the Garden Cinema, 39-41 Parker Street, Covent Garden, London WC2B 5PQ
Programme notes are below. There is a short write-up of the event at the bottom.
London Animation Club brought together two filmmakers to show and discuss a selection of their work.
Joan Ashworth and Laurie Hill met at the RCA over 20 years ago. Their work connects through a fondness for using animation to explore archives. Ashworth approaches the life and work of artist and campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst using archive footage, animation and original interviews with her only son Richard. Hill excavates, rummages and rearranges with a playful eye and taste for absurdity. For both, fragmentary material often finds a fitting shape through collage, montage and fun.
The event is introduced by Martin Pickles and the screening is followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers.
The film programme includes:
Joan Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist, Writer, Fighter (Joan Ashworth/UK/34 mins)
Photograph Of Jesus (Laurie Hill/UK/7 mins)
My First Taste Of Death (Laurie Hill/UK/10 mins)
Sir John Lubbock’s Pet Wasp (Laurie Hill and Osbert Parker/UK/2 mins)
High Street Repeat (Laurie Hill and Osbert Parker/UK/4 mins)
Joan Ashworth
Joan is an artist & filmmaker working with fiction and creative non-fiction. From 1994 to 2015, she headed up the internationally renowned Animation Dept. at the Royal College of Art, London. She studied at the NFTS and co-founded 3 Peach Animation and Seed Fold Films, making commercials and title sequences including the opening titles for Batman 1 directed by Tim Burton. Her short films The Web (1987), How Mermaids Breed (2002) & Mushroom Thief (2010) & Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist Writer Fighter (2024) have screened and been awarded internationally. Joan has published on Animation Therapy and worked with a team funded by the Medical Research Council looking at how animation can engage young patients in giving feedback on their health treatment. Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist, Writer, Fighter excavates Sylvia’s radical life, through an archive of artefacts left behind, giving a sense of Pankhurst’s restless energy. Joan is interested in how animation can be a valuable tool in exploring difficult issues.
Laurie Hill
Laurie is an award-winning multi-media animator and director based in London. He often works with archival and found materials. He studied at the Royal College of Art and his work has screened at many festivals and galleries worldwide including Sundance, AFI Fest, Telluride Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art New York, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, New Art Gallery Walsall, Cornerhouse Manchester and Museum Of London. He was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2007 and was finalist in Jerwood Moving Image Awards 2008. His film Photograph Of Jesus won Best Experimental Short Film at Chicago International Film Festival, Best Animated Short at Seattle International Film Festival, Best Of British Jury Award at Encounters Film Festival and the McLaren Award at Edinburgh International Film Festival. Recently, he co-directed the experimental, archive-delving collage film High Street Repeat in collaboration with Osbert Parker.
https://www.thisisannex.co/about
A short write-up of the evening:
Many, many thanks to Joan Ashworth and Laurie Hill for presenting an amazing event at the Garden Cinema on Saturday.
Joan had shown a variety of work at London Animation Club a few years ago, including test material for Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist, Writer, Fighter and it had been an ambition of mine to screen the film since then. That Joan and Laurie had collaborated on it gave the screening of two filmmakers’ work a special unity and the opportunity to discuss collaboration, as well as the use of collage and archive material.
I asked about the experience of “bringing back to life” a person from archive material. Joan described working with Andrea G Artz, who was able to fold Joan’s flat cut-outs into three-dimensional figures, suitable for stop-motion animation, as well as digitally compiling these sequences with Laurie. These folded figures helped to lift Sylvia out of the flatness of her archive papers and give her more screen presence. The sharp creases of the foldings helped to give Sylvia a more contemporary appeal and have a resonance with constructivism.
I was very interested in Laurie’s use of cut-out and collage in his own work across stop-motion animation (in Photograph Of Jesus) and digital animation in AfterEffects (in My First Taste Of Death). I also heard the word “shonky” for the first time, a word they used to describe the kind of rough spontaneity of animating cut-outs (whether in stop-motion or AfterEffects), a kind of honesty that is hard to simulate.
Another theme we discussed was collage coming out of chaos and asking where one should begin to build a structure out of an almost infinite amount of material. For Joan it was to make five different Sylvias, each representing a different part of her life and career and for Laurie it was to take a phrase from his interviewee (describing someone asking him for an actual photograph of Jesus) and to use that as a unifying theme in his exploration of a photo-archive of several million images.
Special thanks should go to Tom Lowe for making the DCPs which we screened and to David Skertchly for operating the roving mic.
It was great to see lots of familiar faces in the audience. Thank you all for coming.
– Martin Pickles