The Garden Sees Fire

The Garden Sees Fire interlaces real world imagery with fanciful animations through labor intensive analogue processes which took five years to complete. The essence of stop-motion animation is questioning and transfiguring reality. By infusing elements of the human world with the fantastical, unusual beings can exist amongst us, lurking around the periphery of our awareness, amidst the unseen.

Armatured puppets and two-dimensional hinged drawn characters interact with sentient
scenery in richly textured and lushly hued sets of dense forests and dried prairies. The puppets, drawn characters, and armatured trees and plants are created from a sundry of organic and inorganic materials; bringing elements of sensual touch, curiosity, and materiality to their physical beings. The visual tactility conceptually references the handmade processes inherent in every aspect of my stop-motion animations.

16mm footage of rural croplands, forests, prairies, wetlands, and lakes is buried, degrading and transforming the landscapes. Flashes of color and blinding blankness disintegrates the peaceful imagery, infusing it with visual chaos. The sets utilize a rear-projection screen as their backdrop where the altered 16mm is advanced frame-by-frame synchronously with stop-motion animations of the armatured puppets, trees, and crafted plants in the foreground. This unique analogue filmmaking technique conjoins the external natural world in the 16mm with the internal constructed world of the characters, creating a surreal, disorienting concoction of plausibility and impossibility, confounding what is real and imagined; the essence of a mystical tale. Shadowed animated silhouettes dwell in this intermediary space, evoking fleeting nightmares, just on the brink of our consciousness and grasp. Additionally, meticulous two-dimensional animations of characters are hand drawn movement-by-movement in their entirety while silk dyes are painted frame-by-frame directly onto the 16mm film’s emulsion, combining to create intimate investigations into psychological manifestations of dreams and visions.

The entire soundscape for The Garden Sees Fire is crafted independently from the animations. The sound design incorporates found and bent environmental sounds and foley work that adds psychological complexity to the characters, scenes, and implied narrative structures. Original melodies played on a shruti box and select Psalms sung, hummed, and chanted, infuse a sense of mystery and timelessness. The aural landscape conceptually intertwines auditory reality, employing recorded sounds from the human world, with visual fantasy; merging our worlds.

Note: The Garden Sees Fire has no dialogue and thus no subtitles. The Psalms are layered, in chorus, and in rounds with one another; evoking a dream-like consciousness, as if heard from the ethos, beyond awareness.