Hardcore Plant Animation
A story of paper, invasive plants, and finding home.
Hey.
So, in trying to warn people of the aggressive plant species, the British people may have given ‘swallowwart’ the most hardcore plant name of all time: ‘Dog-Strangling Vine’. (For hardcore gardeners only). In this animation, we worked with dog-strangling vine (DSV) to produce paper, and to shape our characters out of its fibres. The spirit of the plant, now gone, but having found new life, in paper.
Depicting a serpentine, crawling, invasive species, Ksha-sha depicts settling into a new environment. The character’s new home is a 180-sheet-brick of plant-paper, which they slowly spread into, taking up as much space as possible. This work was made possible by the deeply involved 4-way collaboration with Emi Takahashi, Elena Kirby, Masumi Rodriguez, and myself.
A couple years ago, I was privileged enough to spend time in Ino, Kōchi, Japan, which specializes in traditional paper production. While driving up very narrow mountain roads, harvesting kozo on the mountainside, stripping the plant of its bark, picking through bleached fibres, pulling perfectly imperfect sheets of paper, and having long conversations with our host Ayumi, I started to see all the life (the anima) in a sheet of paper. Masumi and Elena have spent a lot of time there too, making them the paper experts of our small team.
Paper. Possibly the most obvious material to make animation with, after only celluloid, barely before clay. How creative. Though that animation is usually creating on paper; my question was if animation could be made in paper, like a light in a lantern. The goal was to take a thing as common as paper, and try to see it differently.
Developing this animation process felt like calculating for a careful chemical reaction. There were many variables: wetness, dryness, thickness, blendedness. We wanted the animation to feel a part of the paper, like a natural emboss, so we resolved not to work on the paper’s surface. Another motivation was to avoid making animation where each frame lived on a new sheet of paper, but rather to maintain a continuous environment where the action takes place.
Our solution to these parameters was to layer each new frame on top of the last, melding the pieces of paper together naturally and laying the characters down beneath each new sheet. To form these characters we took unblended plant fibre, pulling strands apart and arranging them into root-like shapes. The sheet itself is just blended plant fibre, meaning the characters and their environment are just the same substance in different states. The end result was a brick of paper with characters embedded within; a single object secretly holding an animation inside.
As we commonly recognize it, paper is a perfect white rectangle, thin as hair and precise in dimension. A sheet comes perfectly aligned with every other sheet below it, collectively forming a homogenous stack resembling a bleached brutalist building (or the new montreal mega-mall). And somehow, as we were frequently reminded as children, this 92 brightness (?), 20lb weight (?) pack from Staples came from the torso of a tree, or something.
Like many things we can buy, paper has become abstracted from its origin point. It was once a tree, or plant, but is now seamlessly woven into the fabric of daily life; a parking ticket, an old book, a garage sale poster. I’m not saying this is necessarily or always terribly bad or evil, but I do think a great act we can do for ourselves is to shrink this gap, between origin and item. I understand a person better when I know their backstory, and the same goes for the things around me.
I’ve been lucky to learn about a different kind of paper, not the one you buy at Staples, but more like ancient paper. Paper made by paper-making, by people involved from the plant-stage to the page-stage.
Made from an inner layer of plant stem or tree trunk, paper-making is a famously labour intensive process. In many traditional Japanese practices, kozo, a mulberry tree, is farmed; grown, harvested, regrown, each year. After harvesting kozo, it is boiled, stripped, pounded, bleached, blended, and thrown into a bath from which sheets are pulled, flattened, and dried.
Like my favourite animators do with animation, Masumi and Elena challenge what paper can be, going against convention. A page can be meters long, strong or flimsy, useable or independent, and made from the typical plant species, or from ‘invasive’ plant species.
Anyway, what exactly is an invasive plant species? They’re surely bad- they have a bad word in their name. (As you can tell, I’m no authority on this subject, but I’m going to do my best). You’ve maybe heard of Kudzu in the south, a plant species that has, rather ornately, overrun seemingly anything it wishes- parked cars, buildings, maybe people. Invasive plant species are seen like pests, to be controlled, managed, exterminated. Their relevance to invasion has to do with how they rapidly spread far, often overtaking other native natural life like trees and other plants. They are aggressive, which of course is not good for our ecosystem.
These plant species are not evil; their invasions are due to the plant having been displaced from its natural environment, where it is often in relative equilibrium: kudzu is originally from China and Japan, where it is mostly appreciated for its medicinal purposes, and dog-strangling vine native to Europe and Asia. Invasive species are pests only contextually- they did not ask to be introduced to the American ecosystem for gardening, so in this foreign biome they won’t be in harmony with other life, but must continue on living.
And hey, who are we to talk? Humans: all up in everyone’s business, uninvited.
We wanted to tell an empathetic story about a typically vilified ‘invasive’ plant species. Masumi and Elena’s practice considers the nuances of these characterized plants and utilizes these “unwanted” plants – destined for uprooting and landfills (dependent on municipalities) – making something with them. Seeing de-rooted dog-strangling vine not as waste, but as valuable material. We used the plant fibre to depict a life that can’t help but spread as it moves, blooming out and retracting back inwards. In the end they tangle together, becoming hard to distinguish from each other.
One form of radical art you can make today has a deep entanglement with a real thing. This means an inseparable relationship with variables out of control. The result is a randomized texture that can be expected but not accounted for, and can only be embraced. If you ask a beaver to shape a log, no one exactly knows what marks it will make.
Generally, we have become too proficient at control; we have stopped looking and listening, we are only projecting and imposing. What we haven’t streamlined, we have developed tools which can smooth out all bumps, rendering origin-points beyond recognition. So boring!
Over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed I have not been seeing things as they are. I’ve had no grasp of origin points. Furniture is trompe l'oeil-ed with wood grain. Chopped celery sells for dozens of dollars at Erewhon. Thousands of queries a minute return generated results, their costs and sources hidden. The result has been very hazy distinction between natural and manufactured, real and unreal.
Art has always, and especially right now, possessed the power to be grounding; to shift perspective, to maybe see a little more clearly. Engaging with something real, maybe something natural, does this; it grounds, and shrinks the ever growing gap between origin and object. This is from not just experiencing made-art, but making art as well. By slowing down, and listening closely to whats around, I feel a little more at home.
Like the little ksha-sha creatures, I’m just a dude from an invasive species trying to find home.
Thanks for reading!
Credits:
Organima: Ksha-sha
Directed by Nik Arthur and Emi Takahashi
In collaboration with Masumi Rodriguez and Elena Kirby
Score by Ivy Boxall
Title design by Emi Takahashi
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