Interlaced: Animation and Textiles

Spanning the gallery and cinema spaces of the Len Lye Centre, Interlaced brings together moving-image works fashioned from textile materials and patterns alongside fibre works inspired by visual transformations made possible by animation.

Artists featured in the exhibition explore ways of embroidering with projected light, quilting celluloid films, and weaving digital tapestries. By braiding together contemporary animation and textile art, Interlaced highlights the influence of textile history and culture on artisanal media production.

The work of renown experimental filmmaker Len Lye (1901-1980) plays an important connective role in the exhibition. Interlaced makes a compelling case for the influence of Pacific tapa design and British textile production on Lye’s innovative animation techniques. Nesting Len Lye’s animated films in a broader field of analogue and digital media, Interlaced explores the enduring capacity of textile forms to make visible animating forces and to reanimate intergenerational cultural memory.

About the Curator:

Interlaced: Animation and Textiles is guest curated by Alla Gadassik, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre’s International Film Curator in Residence (2022-2025). Gadassik is a media scholar and curator of animation and contemporary media art. Her research and writing focus on filmmaking methods across a wide range of geographic and production contexts. Gadassik is Associate Professor of Media History and Theory at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECUAD) in Vancouver, Canada, where she founded the Animate Materials Workshop. The Workshop is dedicated to animation as a method of interdisciplinary material exploration bridging the arts and sciences.