Animation is the expression of internal realities and, as such, it is uniquely suited to unmasking subtexts and revealing unconscious landscapes. With a childhood history in psychoanalysis, a university focus of neuroscience, an adulthood turn toward mindfulness practice, and an almost three-decade career in cinema production classrooms, I tend to approach filmmaking as a conceptual art with focus on the mind and heart.
Similar to using a microscope, I use animation as a technique of analysis – of questioning and understanding reality. Instead of a material investigation, animation is a psychic examination focused inward on the actions of mind instead of the substances of matter. Animation is an inversion of the microscope: instead of collecting realities like a camera, animation casts reality outward like a projector.
Conceptualizing reality as an interior experience allows my filmmaking to work as a mythopoeic collage practice, a process of rearranging the elements of personal and cultural experience into documentary storylines. My projects begin by mining my unconscious for the seeds of narrative. Re-planted, these germs grow into films under the light of conscious awareness and non-judgement.
While stories may be the roots of our humanity, I believe mindful attention is the energy for their growth. I collect, plant, and graft cuttings from ripened stories to cultivate the growth of new narratives. I intentionally cross-pollinate stories to uncover hidden traits. As these dormant traits arise, they become new windows to the unconscious, and the architectures beneath, which invisibly scaffold our reality.
Film is a conceptual art, and viewership is a constructivist activity. As a film grows in the audience’s mind, that is where I position my work, pollinating, digging, planting and harvesting ideas and images in open collaboration with the viewer. I believe art is only in collaboration with it’s audience, human to human, mind to mind.
