Animations
'Dads Dogs Dead'- March 2022
Plasticine Stop-Motion animation, about my dead dog Sunny, coming back from the dead. In collaboration with Sorcha Noble.
'Looking through my bedroom window, the rug was pulled from beneath me' - February 2021
This film is based on the view from my bedroom window. I grew up next to a car wash, where I would watch the workers wash the cars and sometimes rugs. They would hang the rugs to dry on the railings.
'Ram Sundial' December 2020
'Tall Stories' - May 2020
Two separate stories, developed from my memories, playing simultaneously. Both stories are difficult to believe, exaggerated. The young girl climbing the tree is me and my experience when I was a child, and the man climbing the tower is a glass player I briefly saw in the streets of Venice. Each thing that plays a role in these stories are taken from different fragments of my memories, for example, the tower; I saw it whilst walking home one day, and was intrigued to what it was used for. I knew it was some kind of observation tower for someone to climb up, however I could not see anything surrounding it that needed to be watched over, nothing urgent like sinking ships or flood warnings. There was a gap to fill; what happens when the person reaches the top of this tower, what is the purpose of them being there? This is when my brain started imagining lots of different possible scenarios, many of the peculiar.
'Singing Glasses' - March 2020
Some experiences that we witness in day to to day life don’t stop once we have walked past them; they have an after-life. Our brains instinctively replay and ponder them. I walked past the glass player haunted with disbelief, I couldn’t believe that the man rubbing his fingers around rims of glasses filled with water could create a song so angelic that it lit up his presence. I was wracking my brain re imagining the scene searching for a hidden speaker or alternative source of sound. Maybe this is due to me never being successful at making a sound round the rim of a glass. As a kid I told myself it was a well known magic trick I’ve just not been let in on, like whistling with a split blade of grass.
'About Learning' April 2020
This piece is a collaboration with my Dad, Steve Pool. He is currently doing a PHD about ways of learning, and has been going into schools and working with children, gathering information for his research. Since Covid-19, he is unable to carry on this physical research, but wanted to do something with some of knowledge he had gathered. He has been telling me stories the children have told him at the schools, like things they have learned, and I have been making these childrens exsperiences on Blender as an animation. Me and my dad have combined his text and thoughts with my animations to make a film. This is one of them we have made.
'Water Pipes that Sound like Thunder' - March 2020
This animation is made from my memory of when I went for a walk in Lanark, in Scotland, and came across some sort of water system. I walked up through the woods alongside the pipes, near to the top of where they started. I put my hands on the nearest pipe and felt the powerful vibrations it made, it made my heart slightly sink in fear. I then, curiously put my ear onto the pipe, it sounded like thunder. I imagined the mass amount of fast heavy water tumbling down the pipes.
'Objects Modified' - 2019
This animation is site specific to a place in Dumbarton, Scotland, called Lang Craigs. After many trips walking through the hills and countryside, where the pylons path the sky, I imagined the site in my head, however underwater. At the time I was reading Barthes Mytholgies. I can come across his key text, 'Paris not Flooded', where he uses the experience of a flood, to highlight a new way of seeing. Instead of seeing a flood as a disaster, he asks us to see it as a different perspective, the opputinity to see everyday objects half submerged in water, and modified, horizons altered, no more hierarchy of landscape. He talks of lampposts looking like lily pads floating on the surface of the water. Inspired by this I made the site of Lang crags as virtual landscape on Blender, and half submerged it in water. I showed this piece at the site at an exhibition I did there.
'The sheet of water behaved like a successful but familiar special effect, people had the pleasure of seeing certain shapes modified' Barthes, Mytholgies.
'Motif'- 2019
saw an object on the beach a couple of years ago and it has haunted me ever since. It was a circle of metal poles with red bunting wrapped repeatedly around them. The flags chattered in the wind. After this experience, nothing I made was ever as aesthetically pleasing. I fell out of love with art because I failed to make anything better than this effortless object. I decided that there was already too much stuff in the world, and instead of adding to it, I would reveal the potential in existing things. I attempted this by obsessively painting the object from different angles, giving the viewer an essence of what it was and why it was so beautiful. However, the paintings were still and I wanted more. I felt that to make a representation of this object and my experience, I needed to introduce motion.