2:40 minutes
16mm direct animation and acrylic painted screen
2025
Messy Hands approaches direct animation as both material process and temporal conversation. Painting, scraping, and marking 16mm film frame by frame, the work foregrounds the labor, repetition, and physicality embedded within analogue image-making. These gestures become a reflection on matriarchal legacy across personal, historical, and deep-time scales, while also acknowledging the often overlooked histories of female experimental animators. The resulting cameraless film resists seamless representation, drawing attention instead to the surface of the medium itself: marked, unstable, and visibly shaped by the hand that touches it.