After quite impulsively tackling a frame-by-frame sequence of an animated figure merging into a mountainscape using paint on paper a few years ago, the artist started her journey into analogue animation and it's "a rabbit hole I never want to leave", she says. "This sense of continuous, boundaryless flow underpins both my life and my work. In animation, I have found the most compelling way to interpret the world being in constant motion."
In illustrator Chiara Xie 's work, everything is in motion. Rooted in a deep reverence for vitality, Chiara is fascinated by "the rhythm that flows through a scene", lingering like a suspended breath, and other times "surging as a vibrant, agile current of motion". It's not hard to know what she means: every illustration is filled with motion, arcs of light and air bouncing off every corner.
Through the tiny window of short clips on Instagram and TikTok, Mary's world seems enchanting and vast. Bree's work exudes melancholic emotion and ethereal femininity, painting the surfaces of Mary's world in the vibrating style of stop-motion animation, dappled with sparkling light and computer-generated surfaces so convincing it feels like you could pose the model with your own hands. O'Donnell sat down with us to talk a bit about her process creating textures and her life's work making magic real.