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Paper short abstract

My documentary animation film Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist, Writer, Fighter, is underpinned by ethnographic and archival research and uses both analogue and digital collage techniques.

Paper long abstract

My documentary animation film Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist, Writer, Fighter, is underpinned by ethnographic and archival research and uses both analogue and digital collage techniques.

My film Sylvia Pankhurst: Artist, Writer, Fighter, was conceived whilst working as Head of Animation at the Royal College of Art. I discovered Sylvia had been a student there. I undertook ethnographic and archival research and interviewed her son Richard who allowed me access to her paintings of working women. The surviving Pankhurst papers provided inspiration by the material qualities of notebooks, typescripts and drawings.

Different forms of animation, collage and cut-out techniques allowed documentary representation of Pankhurst’s long life and work as both an artist and campaigner. I will show film vignettes and explain the influence of Andrea Artz’s 3d method of folding photos, so that Sylvia could be fused with her own writing and into maps. This engendered a sense of her travels in the North of England, America and Ethiopia, the progress of suffrage and juxtapose Edwardian dress and Silvia’s modernist tendencies.

There is an absence of footage of Sylvia and she arises here as a restless figure seen through her paper trail. I used traditional stop-frame light and shadow and digital scaling and placing. This is ‘trimensional collage’ and ‘creasing the archive’, a way of animating historical time, memory and one individual through her own evidence.