Sarah Edmands Martin
DESIGNERAssociate Professor
University of Notre Dame
Sarah Edmands Martin
DESIGNERAssociate Professor
University of Notre Dame
Work
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Wylie House Museum
Stop motion animation, site-specific installation, projection mapping2020Concept
The site-specific stop motion-animation, Where the Shadow Falls, focuses on the forgotten creative practice of Maggie Wylie Mellette, an Indiana woman born in 1842 century who dreamed of studying art in New York before the obligations of 19th-century marriage and motherhood diverted her path. The piece was first installed in the Wylie House Museum. Built in 1835 by Andrew Wylie, first president of Indiana University, the Wylie House is now a historic house museum administered by the IU Libraries. Collections include family artifacts, photographs, and archival materials.
This work became the launching point of hte broader project, Shadows, which has exhibited across the country. Learn more about the larger project here.
I choreograph frame-by-frame movement across layers of glass. The base of the structure is a light box which allows me to fully control the light source, and at the top is a wide aperture lens which affords me a dynamic vantage point from which to stage and animate.
This stop-motion practice theoretically, methodologically, and aesthetically connects the past to the becoming present. In Between Time: Stop-Motion Techniques for Lost Stories, I argue that stop-motion animation is an appropriate technique for re-centering marginalized stories. The space between frames, the celebration of irregularities or imperfections, can illuminate gaps in how we see the world: the form meets the content. This work is likewise interested in where the wonder of motion’s miracle and its vast uncertainties converge. The stop-motion process I use embraces a design methodology of mining and re-animating archival material in order to create counter narratives. In these stop-motion works, the narrative shifts its focus to the mise-en-scène and the marginal.
To explain why this technique matters, I find the located-ness of speculation’s etymology helpful here. Built into the Latin is “to look” or to “observe from a vantage” which gives us not only the idea of looking, but looking from a particular perspective. In
the Wylie Museum installation (as well as in the broader Shadows project), I proliferate the viewing———the perspective———into 3 different perspectives (17th, 19th, 21st centuries)———not to fill in the blanks, but to invent an otherwise through juxtaposition.
Photo credit: Ethan Gill, IU Office of the Provost, “Sarah Edmands Martin Studio Visit 1,” Wylie House Exhibits, accessed May 29, 2020.
Margaret "Maggie" Wylie Mellette (1842–1938) was an American artist and the first First Lady of South Dakota. Born on August 6, 1842, in Bloomington, Indiana, to Rebecca Dennis and Theophilus Wylie, she attended the Monroe County Female Seminary and Glendale Female College near Cincinnati, Ohio. She married Arthur Calvin Mellette, a fellow Indiana University student, on May 29, 1866, at the Wylie House in Bloomington. The couple had four sons: Wylie (b. 1867), Charlie (b. 1869), Anton (b. 1872), and Dick (b. 1874). In 1878, they relocated to the Dakota Territory, partly to improve Maggie's health. Arthur Mellette served as the last governor of the Dakota Territory and became the first governor of South Dakota. After Arthur's death in 1896, Maggie moved to Pittsburg, Kansas, where she lived until her death on November 29, 1938. She is buried in Watertown, South Dakota.
The aesthetic of my stop-motion technique is specific and intentional. I originally created this technique in 2018 for a series of stop-motion animations called Fractured Vision (see below).
This style of the stop-motion is intentionally erratic. This unique style and technique deployed in both Fractured Vision and Shadows complicate smoothness by introducing friction and imperfect motion. These figures might feel more like marionettes or dolls or cutouts than actual three-dimensional human beings. Here, I’m also thinking about the way that dolls, figurines, and dollhouses in the 19th century were used as ideological play tools for women to learn domesticity.
Indeed, in Critical Play, Mary Flanagan writes that scrapbook dolls and doll houses are “designed to play with and reimagine domestic spaces along with children’s future roles within them…” where playing house in miniature was also “playing house in the normalization of cultural norms…The goal was for players to learn how to manage effectively all aspects of this early version of a virtual household…which in turn becomes the site of instantiation of traditional gender roles surrounding work, play, and consumption.”
The stop motion style here draws our eye to the imperfect locomotion of these flat paper characters. The figure struggles, fumbling through a traditional and heteronormative household.
Detail from Fractured Vision (2018), by Sarah Edmands Martin.
“Sarah Edmands Martin Studio Visit 1,”
Wylie House Exhibits, 2020.
Wylie House Exhibits, 2020.
My use of this stop motion technique also amplifies the work of “closure” that a viewer must perform. In the study of comics, Scott McCloud describes how closure often serves participation in the narrative as the reader moves between panels and across the gutter. In this work, it is more about highlighting the work scholars and artists do within and across archives.
Some speculative work imagines one version of an alternative future. By contrast, this work turns the viewer or museum visitor into an active participant who contributes to the interpretive work. Here, speculation thus turns from a product (a possible future) to a process (a way of seeing)———a participatory and proliferative undertaking.
Speculative archives, including their articulations in the humanities, might more effectively inform the field of design and open possibilities for greater political advocacy and perhaps different forms of action.