As an artist who’s better known for sculpture, performance and drawing, what inspired you to move into animation?

I’d been doing masses of drawings, and films about things and creatures moving in very particular ways and they often had stories. I suppose animation was obvious, but I hadn’t realised. And because it involves so much time and someone who can make animations, being asked by Animate and The Drawing Room to make the work for Shudder gave me the possibility. And now I like animation practically the best out of everything I do.

As you work very much on your own, doing very DIY, hands-on, improvised works, how is moving into animating with someone else? Is it a very kind of different process?

I was just incredibly lucky meeting David Jacobs, the animator who I work with… I have no idea how long we’ll go on working together, because he’s about to graduate from the National Film and Television School (NFTS), and the way I work is quite difficult – because as you say, everything I do is very much made by hand and then changed as it goes along. And things fail often. And if you’ve got a bit of animation that’s taken three days to do and render and then you think actually it isn’t quite right… being haphazard is not so easy in animation.

And it’s time consuming.

Totally. I didn’t realise I would like it, but I really, really like working with other people. It’s always a slight issue, how much you tell people what to do, I find that even though I’ve got a very strong idea of what I like, I find it difficult to explain how I want things to be done. And at the same time I know exactly how I do want them to be done. So that can be problematic.

But no, we work very well together. And with the first film, Mr Panz at Lake Leman, notes on m (notes on mammals and habitats), I knew what the story was going to be but I couldn’t produce a storyboard, which some animators would find impossible. But David was quite happy. He’s come from a fine art background, so he is easy about it. And with the most recent film, we didn’t have a storyboard either, but with the next one I have promised him I’ll do one, so we’ll see.

How do you feel things have moved on since Mr Panz? Apart from the lack of storyboard, are you finding the process much easier to get your head round?

Yes. In the beginning there were all sorts of strange things about drawing for an animation. I make drawings with incomplete lines, with lots of bits missing. It is much harder to do that in animation. My sister keeps telling me that she wants me to do redo the scene in Mr Panz where the mother’s sewing, because she doesn’t have any legs, but I’ve looked at it several times and I think it’s fine.

But it is quite interesting that if you’re going to get an arm to move say from behind your back to in front of it, you have to know what it looks like in every direction. And it’s not at all how I imagined the things I was drawing before. And this really interests me.

Mr Panz was entirely character dependent. With the second film, inspired by the memoir on Gosse and his son, I wanted the child to be invisible and to lose the idea of character. But the character went into the voice. What you see on the screen and what you hear is different yet related. This contrasts with Mr Panz, where there are sound effects and an account of what he’s thinking and these both relate closely to what’s going on on the screen.

So where does your obsession with flora and fauna come from?

I’ve always really liked looking at animals and flora. And I’ve been to that part of the Alps where Mr Panz is set and I’ve seen various butterflies, moths and plants. But I suppose it’s also thinking ‘Okay I love nature’, and being rather embarrassed about that, but also not knowing quite what to do with that, because I live in London and I don’t see trees.

I’m always slightly alarmed by nature when I leave London.

Oh you see, well I’m not at all, I absolutely love it.

One of the most exciting things that happened to me last year was going to London Zoo and being given a hairy cockroach to crawl up my arm. It was just fantastic.

And also, when I’d just started at art school, I went on a scientific expedition into the jungle, one of these really idiotic mad, chance things - I shouldn’t have been there but somehow it happened.

Do you think animals have different traits like humans? Why did you choose an elephant for Mr Panz for instance?

I’m really interested in human characteristics and behaviour. I do draw people, have drawn people, but it doesn’t always work - I tried to draw the characters in Father and Son… The show at Exeter had some drawings of heads, but I think I find people’s bodies and the moment of action tricky.

Animals don’t have quite the same expression or intention as humans, or certainly not the same self-consciousness, even though they can do. I like the idea that you can just see them behaving, which I suppose is what the lobsters at the Jerwood Space are about - trying to see behaviour.

But with Mr Panz, you’re giving human characteristics to the animal; you’re giving it a kind of melancholy and self-doubt…
He’s a very specific case. I have a very strong idea of what this creature would be like – slow, fastidious, lumbering and out of place. I think he’s plaintive. People who exist in time and history are too complex somehow. I think it simplifies it to use animals and to concentrate on absurdity or emotion… I don’t know.

Are you in a way trying to resist the way animated animals are often very cute, making more human, more ugly characters?

Definitely, I normally use animals that aren’t cuddly. Though there’s been a huge explosion of different types of animals being used in film and animation in the last ten years.

Like Bugs and Antz…

Completely. And I don’t know if it’s because it’s so much easier now to animate, so there’s just more animation around, it feels like that. But also before it used to be bears and rabbits and dogs. There has also been a huge interest in animals in art I think. I remember when I first was at Goldsmiths and was concentrating on animals. It seemed slightly ridiculous and not at all appropriate.

Like Bedwyr Williams said in his performance about art students, “You can go back to your studio and do your silk screen print of amusing dogs…”

Yes, absolutely. It was like that. It couldn’t be serious. I remember showing someone a drawing of a mouse and they said, “What on earth do you think you’re doing?” I didn’t really know, but it was interesting that the subject itself was totally unacceptable. But, I do really like Victorian, 19th Century novels where you’ve a panoply of emotions and characteristics.

The melodrama?

It’s not the grand behaviour that I really love; it’s the making off with a broom or being slightly unpleasant about someone’s hat ribbons; the trivial. It‘s that teeny little moment which gives you a character and a huge picture beyond it.

That was something I noticed with Mr Panz and with …in a rose columned forest - that you have this kind of Victoria era sensibility. Do you have a little nostalgia for times gone by that you’re recreating in your films?

No, not at all, I think it would be hideous to have been around then. We’d have all been either up chimneys or having toothache or doing embroidery.

But I think I have a got a bit of a guilty nostalgia for imagining that sort of life where you don’t have to work and you’re totally detached in a way. With Mr Panz at Lake Leman finding out about Nabokov (maybe in Speech, Memory), started me off. He lived in the Montreaux Palace Hotel at the end of his life and went up to meadows behind it to chase butterflies. Nabokov’s not unknowing like Mr Panz is. But that idea of living that life, the melancholy and detachment of being exiled from where you were born is a parallel. Apart from that Nabokov’s and Mr Panz are different – Nabokov was intensely productive and cerebral and had a huge butterfly collection whereas Mr Panz never catches one.

So what comes first in your process? Do you start with the drawings and then do the narrative?

Well with the first film, Mr Panz, I knew the story very quickly. The proposal I wrote at the beginning hardly changed at all. I could write it down but I couldn’t visualise it and couldn’t make an animatic. Instead I made lots of drawings - far too many, and then masses of changes. Quite often I’d realise that what I’d done early on was actually what I wanted.

I remember spending ages looking on the internet for images of hotel rooms and dining rooms and thinking, “I’m going to have to go to a museum”, and then realising that the wallpaper I’d used at Camden Art Centre was the answer. It gives you the idea of the outside because it’s got a view of a Swiss lake, and just drawing a very simple window and a table over the top was enough.

With the second film, I had this idea of constantly moving, varied shots of different scenes from a rock pool that could be just one pool. Just building them up over time. In fact the most complicated shots we left out in the end because the movement wasn’t right. The narrative came afterwards. So the two films were the exact reverse really.

What would you say inspires you? Apart from nature.

I was thinking the other day how I really like all sorts of sound artists. I love the way David Lynch uses sound - and a Japanese musician Kit and Alex took me to see, Otomo Yoshihide, who used focused minimal sound to create all kinds of extraordinary landscapes. But that’s not what I do at all.
Although I think about the sound in the animations and films for hours.

I love William Wegman’s videos from the 70s. They’re really simple and very direct, and I suppose that’s what I started off trying to do. Wegman had a huge camera that couldn’t be moved so he had to set up scenarios. He frequently used his dog, a Weimaraner. He’d just make these teeny little three or four minute films that would make you really laugh but which are also profound. They are very simple – two lights on a table and a voice going, “Mum …… mum I think Randy’s going to be sick” and then one lamp falls over. Very, very playful.

And your work is definitely very playful. So with this film, where did you find Phillip Gosse? What inspired the work?

When I was at school I went into a second-hand bookshop and was mooching about, and the owner said, “You should read this, it’s really brilliant.” I only read it two years ago, but it is absolutely astounding.

The book, Father and Son by Edmund Gosse is about his father, who was both a scientist and a religious fanatic. His mother was also a fanatic who wrote tracts that were very successful. She used to travel round London giving them to people on omnibuses. There’s a scene in the book where the son remembers seeing a solider in red uniform in their house, just about to go off to the Crimean war, being converted on his knees by his mother.

It’s a really extreme book and it makes you think about religious extremism now. But it’s also very interesting because in a way it’s very affectionate. It’s about this person who simply cannot understand where he’s come from, because he both loves his parents and feels utterly alienated from them. And I find that a very interesting feeling.

Yes, I think that comes across in the film as well. There’s that kind of wistfulness in the opening narration when he talks about memories of the seas his father wrote about, that he couldn’t escape from.

Yes, but then there’s an autobiography of Gosse and of Edmund Gosse the son, which is very scathing about the book and says that Edmund is very unfair to his father and that what he wrote wasn’t true. And I think I much preferred it when I just read the novel and didn’t have that overview.

But it’s the subjective viewpoint that’s interesting, isn’t it? Like Christina Crawford’s Mommie Dearest: you know that the memoir is not the whole truth, but her take on the relationship.

Yes, exactly. I really did much prefer it when it was a slightly hermetic sealed worldview. And I think that’s what I like about animals too, the idea that they haven’t got that awareness of the horrible complexity of things.

Well you certainly get that in your film with the prawns just gaily tumbling about oblivious to the melancholy of the voiceover. And also in Mr Panz, where you have the character reminiscing about his tutor. Is there any particular reason you’ve gone for stories about male relationships?

I know, I wonder about it often. With …in a rose columned forest, I tried several female voices and they just didn’t work.

And in the films where I’m dressing up in costumes, I often think about the characters as men too. With the narrative voiceover in …in a rose columned forest the main characters are both male…. but there was no need for the voiceover to be male.

In another set of films I really love, Jane Campion’s Passionless Moments. (They are totally wonderful. They’re very funny)… She has this extremely classic sounding authoritative male voiceover which I was surprised about but it works brilliantly.

Lampooning cinematic tradition in a way?

Yes, I think she’s parodying the idea of it, because what the narrator is saying is ridiculous, but also true.

With your films, the authoritative tone of the narrations reminds me of David Attenborough, of the voiceovers of nature documentaries.

Does it? It’s so fascinating …why there aren’t female voiceovers in nature documentaries.

Because women are too excitable perhaps?

But then David Attenborough’s very excited isn’t he? I mean he’s charming and totally focused. I don’t know for ….in a rose columned forest I wanted Alex to sound removed. I tried myself and really thought that I’d be able to do it because I knew the material so well. But I was terrible. I think Alex’s voice may work because it has a low tone.

It doesn’t foreground itself.

I suppose that’s it. Ole’s voice in Mr Panz is low and distant and deadpan. Mr Panz starts off with a description of what the people who surround him are like. The voiceover is like a version of natural history. It describes his habitats and his habits.

And with …in a rose columned forest, there’s the opening when you suddenly realise you’re looking through a microscope.

Gosse had written this book called Evenings at the Microscope. It’s genteel and slightly psychotic.

And I suppose, I got this sense in some ways that - although I would hate it - there’s a part of me that can’t think of anything better than spending evenings at the microscope surrounded by my family.

So you studied philosophy originally, and to me your films seem like there’s a bit of existential anguish going on there. Would you say this is something you’re concerned with, by creating lonely, frustrated characters in all your films?

Yes, can we just say yes, certainly that’s true.

Because, when I was talking about William Wegman and saying that he makes these films, that are very funny, yet deep, they do seem to be asking, very lightly, all sorts of questions about the world and language and how you experience the world. Everyone muddles along, but it doesn’t quite fit. And I love that.

I always feel ambivalent about talking about philosophy; it was very dry but that was also exciting. The type of philosophy I did was not at all interested in human emotion, it’s all shifted slightly now. Although when I say that you know, I’m caricaturing it and if you look at old philosophers like Descartes or Hume, they’re fantastically interested in the whole of human nature.

But I suppose when I was studying philosophy, it was really to do with ‘how can you know what meaning means?’ and ‘how can you know something?’ - very abstract questions. I sometimes think that it’s left me in this arrested development state of being slightly confused.

But with some of the art that I really like, like Otomo Yoshihide or Jack Smith, they’re sort of wonderful but they’re not emotionally engaging, they are excitable and there’s that scenario of feeling excited by and something poignant in the disengagement.

I thought that was quite interesting with …in a rose columned forest, how the way the images are framed with the microscope and the black rectangular frame made viewer
aware that she/he is a passive observer, looking in on this world.

Yes, it is interesting isn’t it? Gosse started a great trend to have an aquarium in your parlour. So it could be actually in your world, and you could sit and look at your anemones. I suppose that is one of the things about animals; because we can’t speak to them we’re always separate to them, that difference is absolute but we can look at them.

So you are currently exhibiting at the Jerwood Space in SHOW. How do your human lobsters fit into your body of work?

They can’t really have facial expressions because of their shells but they fiddle with things and gradually they are working out what to do…

You’ve created your own aquarium in your front room.

Yes, in a way. It is growing and the rocks are getting more convincing. At the moment I’ve got problems with the lobsters because they usually lie on the ocean floor or float because I don’t like costumes having legs really. Lobsters really just have very big hands, almost like homunculuses. I was thinking this morning about using trolleys perhaps or maybe office chairs, because I want to be able to get them to glide.

Roller skates?

I think office chairs may be the way, because with roller skates there’ll just be terrible bureaucratic health and safety issues. They’ll just all injure themselves.

I wanted the performance space to be as exciting as a studio when you are first setting out and there’s lots going on. And then, as you said, you can also make your own live aquarium.

You didn’t realise how inspired you were by Philip Gosse?

No, I hadn’t at all, not at all. And I was trying to it hold off. I kept on bringing in things that look like seaweed, but I just thought it was too pathetic. But over the weeks when there aren’t quite so many people around I’m going to get the seaweed out.

So what's next after SHOW?

Oh good lord. Well, I’m doing something at the Barbican, which is part of Pioneers of the Downtown Scene. It’s an evening of 30 artists doing 2 minutes each, which is fantastic, to have a show for 5 weeks and then a 2 minute piece.

Have you thought about what you’re doing yet in your 2 minutes?

I said I wanted to do something with lobsters, I don’t want to give the game away, but you’ll have to come along on the 15th of April to see.

And a group show at WORKS | PROJECTS in Bristol with Andy Holden and David Mackintosh.

Then David Jacobs and I are making a film, which I do have a storyboard for. It is an anti-shark finning animation for Global Ocean, a marine conservation charity. We’ve been given complete freedom to do whatever we want. It will be online.

Again it involves a lonely child and his more objectionable parents going to a Chinese restaurant. While he’s waiting the boy meets a dogfish in the restaurant aquarium, and the fish starts telling him about sharks and how they have a bad time of it.

One last thing to ask, how did …in a rose columned forest feed into the Out With the Hammers exhibition at Phoenix Gallery in Exeter?

To see the film, you go through another gallery which is full of drawings based on Gosse’s books, and ill-fitting characters on sticks made out of woollens and plungers and things, which are sort of Victorian. I semi-imagined they were Gosse and his lady friends, because he used to take Victorian parties out on rock-pooling expeditions. And they are these slightly disagreeable looking women peering down at very badly made papier-mâché rocks. And then on the walls, which have been painted buff colour, there are little drawings from Gosse’s drawings, sort of misdrawn or slightly skewed interpretations of things.

So the exhibition hinges around Philip Gosse?

Yes it does. It’s got a slightly museum installation feel to it, almost as if you’re going into a waxworks museum.

And there are little examples of his work and stuffed birds, then you go round the corner and you can hear the sound of the sea. It‘s very nice to be able to do an installation like that around the film.

And then on the other side there are Mr Panz and other videos. So it felt like a big show. It was very exciting to do, and I think it went well. There were some funny things written in the comments book anyway.

It was interesting because we went and gave a talk at the gallery and no one there was interested in animation technique at all. David and I both went there thinking we were going to talk about Maya and After Effects and have technical conversations. But it wasn’t about that at all. People were more interested in the stories.