An extract from one of the most influential texts in scientific literature, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, was the inspiration for this beautiful animation of embroidered plant forms. Designer Stefanie Posavec and animator Abbie Stephens worked together to create A Flowering Theory, and here Stefanie Posavec describes her role in the process.
I’ve always been interested in language and literature, and much of my previous work revolves around the visualisation of text, where I’ve worked with themes, paragraphs, words and the like to create visual representations of a piece of literature. However, I’ve never created work with the invisible grammar that holds a sentence together, and this film presented an opportunity to explore this subject further.
Using the well-known ‘entangled bank’ passage from the conclusion of Charles Darwin‘s On the Origin of Species (a text I have worked with before), I converted the passage’s grammatical structure of interconnected nouns, verbs, and other word types into an ‘entangled bank’ of visualised words and grammar.
Abbie Stephens art-directed and animated this film, taking my static visualisations and breathing life into them through her translation of the flat graphics into a sewn paper, stop motion animation. This group of ‘grammar plants’ grow and flower, alluding to how Darwin’s theory first took root and then flourished, changing how we as humans see our place in the world.
A Flowering Theory was commissioned by Protein as part of Channel 4 Random Acts.
Categories ,A Flowering Theory, ,Abbie Stephens, ,animation, ,art, ,Channel 4 Random Acts, ,Charles Darwin, ,embroidery, ,On the Origin of Species, ,Protein, ,Stefanie Posavec
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