I create short-form animated films driven by the process of hand-making. My imagery is sourced from early silent cinema I’m drawn towards, allowing intuition and the unconscious to play a major role as I shape a work. To that end, I often unite elements that do not have an obvious, shared context. I work with them to create an atmosphere where this non-rational alignment is somehow natural and poetically sound. I feel my way through archival material, searching for a sense of inevitability and emotional coherence in the sequencing and flow of the images. I do not storyboard my films; instead, the narrative core evolves, becoming a mutable, flowing presence thick with suggestion. I’m drawn to moments of ambiguity and intimacy—and to actors who have given a role particular psychological complexity. Over time, my works have developed a gothic sensibility; the mysteries of night, shadow, and a lurking unknown are integral to their tenor.
My films take several years to produce, during which I construct thousands of individual paper collages, seamlessly combining film images with fragments of 19th-century engravings and illustrations. I work sequentially, frame by frame, where each second of film requires eight individual collages. My approach is experimental, informed by surrealist techniques of collage and montage. As short-form film, animation allows for condensed drama and an immediacy of immersion I enjoy.
In my films, I freely edit and alter the performances of my actors to render new personas for iconic early film stars like Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, and Janet Gaynor. The films give these women personal agency and empower them as protagonists whose stories unfold in strange disquiet. By re-contextualizing historical footage and gender, I encourage a feminist reappraisal of both film and this historical period when the still undefined realm of cinematic language overflowed with creative expression and experimentation.
I’m curious about the nature of longing and how it provokes and mediates experience. Deep yearning carries my heroines toward moments of dismay and self-discovery—points of transition figure strongly in my work. My heroines face these junctures with insight and self-reflection, steeled for endurance. Each project’s sound design, created in partnership with contemporary composers, enhances these anticipatory, pivotal moments. My latest film is a collaboration with artist John Romano, where I design the animation, and he edits the material, contributing additional design elements throughout the process.
In 2011, I began to explore installation formats for my films, collaborating with colleagues and fabricators to design free-standing objects that mirror key elements in a film—a house, a tower of antique beds, and a laboratory instrument. These structures serve as miniature screening “rooms” for looped sections of my animations, seen at small scale. I find that the installations extend the metaphorical power of a film, confusing fictive and real space. They allow me to question filmic scale and to play with visual distortion and presentation. As a viewer peers into one of these structures, as if through a keyhole, their psychological and bodily relationship to the film shifts, compounding the experience by enacting voyeurism and fantasy.
—Stacey Steers