The theme of Animation (in) Flux invites us to consider a field shaped by continual technological, industrial and cultural change. Looking back over twenty years of practice, I have worked across stop-motion, hand-drawn animation, digital hand-drawn animation, documentary, virtual reality, projection mapping, and interactive installation. While the technologies have continually evolved, the questions driving my practice have remained remarkably consistent. Rather than asking what new technologies can do, this keynote asks what animation itself can do: how it might create relationships between lived experience, audiences and environments through an ethics of care.
Reflecting on an iterative programme of practice-as-research, I consider how each project has generated the next line of inquiry. Beginning briefly with Bathroom Privileges, I trace an ongoing interest in animation's ability to communicate subjective experience beyond the conventions of observational documentary. This has developed through a body of work centred on the lived experiences of women, exploring themes including medical misogyny, trauma, mental health, disability and wellbeing through trauma-informed production methodologies.
The keynote focuses on Plunge, a short animated documentary that became a catalyst for expanding my research into immersive and interactive storytelling. During its development, questions of wellbeing became inseparable from the environments in which they were experienced, shifting my attention towards environmental care and hydrocitizenship. Two subsequent projects, Plunge Immersive and Glacies, extend this research through virtual reality and embodied interaction, exploring how animation might foster new relationships between bodies, stories and shared blue spaces.
Rather than positioning animation solely as a representational medium, I reflect on Animating Care as an emerging way of understanding my own practice-as-research: one in which animation becomes a relational methodology, carried across changing technologies while remaining grounded in care, collaboration and embodied experience. Reflecting on twenty years of practice, I've begun to understand my work through this idea.