Antarctic Animation

Sailing Girl

LR There's something about this little figure that reminds me of being in Antarctica. Astonished to be there.

CB Yes, isn't she lovely, sailing along there.

image, (found by) Carmel Bird (2003), words, Carmel Bird and LR (2003), animation, LR (2006)

NOTES

Carmel Bird emailed me the photo from Barcelona in 2003, when she was working there on a novel about the Black Madonna. In the early mornings she would walk past this strange little sculpture, and it made her think of Antarctica. Fragments of our conversation frame the image.

The katabatic (very strong windy) effect arose as the machine I was using to produce an edition of prints was running out of ink, leaving an interesting patchiness on the paper. The prints were sent to Switzerland in a hand made cloth and wooden box: a contribution to the touring exhibition, 'Flying Carpet'. Sailing Girl prints were exhibited in various international galleries, amongst the work of 100 women artists from around the world.

L.R. August 2006

TECHNICAL NOTES

To make animated gifs on a linux system, you'll need to have installed ImageMagick. This can run on all major operating systems, but the commands may be a little different on each.

• To ensure that you dont trash your originals, make copies to another directory.
• Copy a bunch of .jpgs or .pngs to a empty folder.
• Arrange in animation order in folder by manipulating filename: eg by numbering 001.jpg, 002.jpg etc.
• $cd to that directory
• $mogrify -format gif *.jpg [enter] to convert all to .gif format
• $convert -delay 20 *.gif -loop 0 animation.gif [enter] converts to animated.gif with delay of 20/100ths of second between frames and loops n times (0=continuously)

Ken Wilson 31 August 2006