Welcome to Edge of Frame, a Substack about experimental animation.
Here you will find writing about artists who use animation in bold and daring ways, to pursue personal visions, raw expressions, formal experiments and investigations into unknown territory.
This Substack continues on from the Edge of Frame Wordpress blog (2013-2022), which covered experimental animation from around the world. As with the blog, the focus here remains predominantly on interviews, delving into artists’ methods and techniques, their routes into animation and the contextual issues around their work. I’ll also be talking to curators, writers and others in the field, as well as posting some news, links and reviews.
Paid subscribers to this Substack will receive at least one in-depth interview or article per month, plus access to the archive. All subscribers will receive occasional shorter posts with links and news.
A few years after starting the Edge of Frame blog I began putting on screenings and events. Since then I have shown work by over 200 artists at major venues in the UK and beyond. Becoming a paid subscriber to this Substack gives crucial support to all Edge of Frame activities, providing a platform for experimental animators and stimulating discussion of their work.
There are more people making and watching experimental animation than ever before. Despite this there are still relatively few organisations, books, websites or festivals solely devoted to this area. The Edge of Frame Substack aims to provide a useful resource for other artists, animators and anyone else who is interested in this rich and vibrant, yet often marginalised area of practice.
“Delving into the many offerings of Edge of Frame demonstrates the rewards of taking a chance, of welcoming strange ideas and experiencing new things.”
- Little White Lies
About me
My name is Edwin Rostron, I am an artist and animator based in London, UK. I have been making animated films for over 25 years (that’s a clip from one of my recent films above) and I also make drawings, paintings, photographs and other artworks. I have shown my work internationally, including at Ann Arbor Film Festival, GLAS, Light Matter, New Chitose Festival, Eyeworks, Pictoplasma, Punto y Raya, BFI, Cafe OTO, Artists’ Television Access, Imperial War Museum and The Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), with solo retrospectives of my work at CRANC, Barcelona and BEEF, Bristol.
I taught for six years on the Animation Programme at the Royal College of Art and have been a visiting lecturer at other institutions including CalArts and Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design. I was a judge for the Arts Foundation Futures Award for Animation and on numerous animation festival juries. Through Edge of Frame I have published interviews with a broad range of experimental animators, and programmed screenings and talks at BFI Southbank, Barbican, Whitechapel Gallery, Close Up, Flatpack Festival and London International Animation Festival.
