Typical institutional curtains, when taken down and thrown in a pile.

Lenka Vojtiskova came in with a bunch of rolled up strip curtains from her work, a care-home for children. She thought it was a shame to throw the long fabric strips away and asked if I could make some kind of wall decoration for her workplace. With such a particular material, that at the same time don’t carry with it many cultural associations (what I mean is that most people wouldn’t even necessarily recognize the strips as curtains if re-used in a different context) I started thinking about the specific ways that long strips of fabric could be used, so in this case functionality took precedence over associations. Since they were white and of suitable proportions, I felt that they would lend themselves well to a kind of moving picture machine or animated painting. Stitching the strips together in hoops, I then constructed a frame with wooden rolls that could support a number of horizontal picture loops.

The function of the artwork is just as visible as the function of the depicted locomotions.

Using open source archives, I then found suitable photographic series from Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of human locomotion. My assistants painted a number of simple monochrome motion series based on Muybridge’s studies that in a clear and playful way illustrate the nature of human movements over time.

The images illustrate motion even when they are not moving.

The rolls supporting the picture loops can be turned by means of two wooden handles on the underside of the frame, but not very fast, and even if they were, turning them doesn’t resemble film or moving images, since the viewer can see the whole series at the same time, slowly sliding to the side as the handles are turned. The filmic moment happens, rather, in the mind of someone looking at the series and following them from start to end in their mind’s eye. Since we are so familiar with film, we can translate a painting like this one into film even without seeing it move. I hope that my artwork both helps illustrate human motion, and film or animation, by showing simplified shapes and fragments of both phenomena and allowing the brain to fill in the rest.

Object no. 17