Savinder Bual, Winner of Arts Foundation Futures Awards 2022 for Animation, publishes 9 Notes; a new artist publication introducing the ideas and approaches that fuel her artistic practice and moving image work.
Savinder Bual is fascinated by the mechanics and illusory qualities of cinema and early animation; she says:
“We live in a time where physical things are disappearing. This has drawn me to juxtapose tangible everyday materials with the relative immateriality of video.”
Savinder imagines herself to be a cinema pioneer, and her work references mechanical inventions from the 18th and 19th centuries. A period of engineering advancement that was inextricably linked to new ways of seeing as a form of colonial control, from navigating the seas to the 24-hour clock replacing the sun as a marker of time. Savinder explores the interplay between the moving and the still, creating work that sits between the pre-cinematic and the digital.
9 Notes illuminates Savinder’s bewitching work and unique aesthetics, featuring projects such as Fade (2020), which takes the first self-recording tidal gauge, an observation device erected on the Isle of Sheppey in 1830 as its starting point. A water-powered slide projector projects an image of a seascape, which slowly appears to flood. In Javasu (2019) a sea monster weaves and bends through wooden rollers, drawing upon various points in history in which the pineapple and moving panoramas triggered the public’s imagination to wonder what it was like to journey to faraway lands. Punch (2019) and Walk Cycle (2018) see Disney-esque illustrations of fists and shoes animated through automatons, while in Pinjekan (2015) a paper wing flaps as a propellor is set in motion by the momentum of the viewer walking.
Also included in 9 Notes is an essay by Alex Hetherington; The Student Of Hallucinations, The Absent, Moon And The Law Of The Feather, who observes in Savinder’s work that:
“…the subtlest of change becomes monumental and in doing so encounter, through a sense of wonder, wider universal events and natural phenomenon.”
PRESS INFORMATION
Read the Press Release here.
If you are a writer or journalist and would like a copy of the book please email: info@artsfoundation.co.uk