“This year, with the assistance of grants from both the City of Yarra, and City of Melbourne, I am working on a new angle to my practice. Having studied painting for four years at the VCA, and then Monash Uni, I then diverged into hand-drawn animations. Most of my work in 2008-09 has been animation, and has screened at various artist-run spaces, as well as festivals such as MIAF and the St Kilda Film Festival. I decided to return to works on paper, paintings, collages – and step away from the repetitive work of animation. I have titled this new body of work Persistence of Vision, the term used when describing the human perception and cognition of moving images through single frames being rapidly displayed (the principle that allows animation to work). I thought it might be a fun thing to see what the Futurists, and perhaps the Cubists, may have done had they been raised with the innate understanding of movement as the video-generation seems to have. The works take simple human movements, such as shooting a basketball, skateboarding, swinging a golf club, and break down the movements as one would for animation, but instead condense the ‘frames’ onto on image. The first half of this project has taken failed movements as a focus – missed shots, failed tricks, awkward walks. The second part of the project, which will commence later in the year, will focus on the way we learn to move, specifically using the children’s playground as an anchor” – Simon O’Carrigan
