Suffolk-based visual and performance artist, Caroline Wright, offered our art scholars a fun and fascinating insight into the world of animation with a bespoke workshop in our design centre.

After studying at the Norwich University College of the Arts and graduating with a MA in Fine Art, Caroline’s incredible visual work has taken her across the world; from the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad Festival and the Edinburgh Festival to Stanford University and San Francisco.

Some of Caroline’s key works include ‘My Home is My Museum’, which examines domestic objects in performance, ‘Respond/Reply’, a research project into the relationships between drawing and writing, and ‘Sawdust and Threads’, a project which took deaccessioned museum objects to explore materiality, value, and hierarchy.

Swapping from artist to teacher, Caroline joined our art scholars during the Spring Term for a fun afternoon introduction of animation.

Assigning the groups of three with a material to use, such as clay, fabric, pencil, or ballpoint pens, alongside a chosen action, such as push, throw, fall, squash, the pupils used cameras and box lighting to capture their animation through stop motion.

Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, so that they will appear move freely and smoothly when the frames are all played back. Popular stop motion films include Nightmare Before Christmas, Wallace and Gromit, Fantastic Mr. Fox and The LEGO Movie.

Caroline’s current work explores the connections, entanglements and relationships of eroded coastal material and the sea swimming body where sensation and bearing corporeal witness to a disappearing coastline may articulate understanding of change and adaptation.