Laid-Back Live Animation at The Loft

She's back! The Accidental Animator (aka Anne-Marie Parry) enthralled us again with her live animation installation at the recently re-launched Loft Bar on Mansfield Road.  This was a great venue for the Accidental Animator to launch her latest project. It's cool, it's laid-back, and it's arty - just like the installation taking shape before us. This is such a sweet concept that maybe Nottingham Contemporary should commission Anne-Marie to repeat this exercise in its lofty halls there. This art is most certainly visual. 

The idea this time was to create a collage of a scene using recycled material (largely, discarded flyers from the many and various venues around Nottingham), and getting the visitors (i.e. audience) to participate in its creation by ripping or cutting their own shapes and sticking them on to the canvas. Anne-Marie had sketched out in pencil a Nottingham montage featuring such iconic landmarks as the Sneinton Windmill, the Council House, Vicky Centre flats, the Right Lion (as opposed to the Left), and even the Loft Bar building itself. All that was required then, was to cut and paste the detail – the 'colouring-in' bit. Great for occupational therapy! 

By using re-cycled flyers from the city, slowly the collage became transformed into a truly Nottingham landscape (see left). And the really nice thing is that it was given this transformation by people who perhaps wouldn't normally interact with art form at all; people who live in Nottingham too. 

But there's a clever twist to this. The finished collage is not the main player in this installation. No, the picture itself is just the 'cause' to the real 'effect' and is not even required after the event. In fact, the picture could be jettisoned almost as a by-product (bit cruel though). For while people were helping to create this trompe l'oeil before our very eyes, our clever Accidental Animator was filming the progress and creating stills of the developing scene. These stills will then be used as an animated film showing the build up of the picture, projected onto the walls of the Loft Bar. It will be a bit like a massive flip-book created not by just one artist, but by many. A real, live, living flip-book, if you like. 

On a dreary, weather-pounded winter's afternoon, this colourful and cheeky window of art-in-the-making is just what you need to cheer you up. 

Accidental Animator, showing on a random wall in Nottingham's Loft Bar, sometime in week-commencing 23rd November.