For three months, Julia Fernandez would spend the hours between 8 a.m. and noon waiting for the right light to filter into her Brooklyn studio. Once the shared space was properly lit, she would swap out a grid of 12 ceramic tiles and take overhead photos that would eventually be pieced together into the charming stop-motion animation, “Dirt.”
The music video for an acoustic song by Los Angeles-based Emory, Fernandez’s film cycles through 300 tiles that reveal a small rabbit hopping across the frame, children running, and a spindly, line-drawn flower blooming and wilting. Each carved character is set within the grainy patchwork, which highlights the medium’s particularities through irregular edges and differences in the glazes. Combined with the physical manipulations required of stop-motion, the ceramic animation is a poetic ode to an unlikely pairing of tactile media.
In a conversation with It’s Nice That, Fernandez shares that she first melded the two after etching a small cup that doubled as a zoetrope. Also featuring a rabbit and a flower, this playful compilation is a clear precursor to the techniques and characters that shine in “Dirt.” “Seeing a material that’s supposed to be still and permanent begin to move felt like magic, like I had cracked some code in reality to create movement that should otherwise be impossible,” she said.
Watch more of the artist’s ceramic animations on Instagram.
