Jonathan Gillie
An interview with the Nottingham based animator on approaching animation as a painter, trying not to think too much, flicker-induced out-of-body experiences... and more
Please be advised the videos in this post feature flashing or flickering lights.
Jonathan Gillie creates beautiful, strange and intricately layered animations, as exhilarating as they are optically shocking. His work treads the line between representation and abstraction, and eschews narrative structure in favour of accretion and variation. For over two decades Jon has been working steadfastly from his base in Nottingham, UK to push forward the limits of what can be done with animation - and the limits of what can be seen. He has taken inspiration from painting, quantum physics, DMT trip reports and Japanese landscape painting - to name but a few of his myriad areas of interest. A keen sense of curiosity and exploration runs throughout his work, which can be described as truly experimental.
Throughout my own practice it has been heartening and inspiring to just know that Jon is working too, always trying something new and yet keeping on his own unique path. His work is often playful and unexpected, but its strangeness is not for effect or to simply shock; rather it is the result of a genuine and serious artistic enquiry. Jon’s work reveals the incomprehensible strangeness of our world, peeling the layers of sediment from our eyeballs to let us see things anew.
Jon’s work has been screened widely, culminating in his first solo exhibition, States of Being, at the TSI Harland Snodgrass Gallery, Alfred, NY, in 2022. He has recently screened work at Relentless Melt, Hong Kong, Projio Tampere, Finland, Opera Rakjat, Indonesia and presented an Animation Masterclass at the Punto y Raya Academy in Barcelona. In 2016 he was presented with awards from the London International Animation Festival and Punto y Raya for his work in animation.
EoF: Can you give a bit of biographical background about yourself? How did you begin working with animation?
JG: I grew up in the small town of Berwick upon Tweed, Northumberland, England. I studied Art Foundation at Wandsworth College of Art, London and a Bachelor of Arts at Nottingham Trent University. I live in Nottingham with my daughter Betty and partner Laura.
Like most animators I was interested in drawing and painting as a child, mostly copying from cartoons and album covers. When I started my Art Foundation course in London there was almost daily life drawing which I loved. I was also really influenced by architecture and infrastructure of the city and I began creating abstract paintings for the first time.