Goodbye Sorrow From Katie Armstrong

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Story by weirdwolf

Published on Mar 18, 2010 in Watch

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Artist, animator, poet and former Etsy Blog intern Katie Armstrong has created a moving animation using hundreds of her original illustrations and animated with Flash. Goodbye Sorrow is a haunting piece of grief and longing.

The process takes a very long time, which is actually ideal for me because exhaustion becomes a kind of tool for what I do. The more tired I am, the looser I get, and the looser I am, the braver I become.

“Blue are the words I say and what I think. Blue are the feelings that live inside me. I’m blue da ba dee da-ee dabba dee-a dabba dea da ba dee dabba da…” — “Blue” by Eiffel 65

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I think there are a few reasons for my gravitation to the medium of moving images. The first would be that, in terms of the history of fine art, animation is still relatively young (compared to something like painting, for instance). Because of this, it doesn’t carry a lot of historical baggage, and has so much untapped potential. Especially today, in the age of digital media.

With the Internet making it increasingly easier to release video work into the world, and at such high definition, I can’t help but want to be a part of this strange, new, growing community. At the same time, I want to remind this digital land that there are human beings behind every strand of code, and that’s where my handmade, nostalgic aesthetic comes from. Little jumps, imperfect lines, textures, and cracks in my singing voice are conscious efforts to remind the viewer that a person made what they are watching. fallen.jpg

The second reason is that I am actually trained as a dancer and come from a family of musicians. I have always been interested in sound and its relationship to the visual world, so making animations allows me to explore my love for drawing and movement with my love for making music and noise.

Right now, I’m taken with the idea of reworking well-known, tacky pop songs from my childhood and pairing them with a visual interpretation, as I did with the song “Blue” by Eiffel 65 for Goodbye Sorrow. It’s funny, the Wikipedia entry for the song claims that the subject, “blue,” was picked at random, and that the lyrics were written to be more or less nonsensical or irrelevant. It’s strange how much the song changes and how meaningful the words become, just by singing it a little slower and juxtaposing it with different imagery. It is as if, by pulling apart the formulaic structure of the original tune, and presenting it with my own visual narrative, I can somehow confront the alienness of the song, and coax it into becoming something more human.

 

Watch other videos by Katie Armstrong on her website and read some poetic ramblings on her blog.

Etsy Videos | Artistic Endeavors Series

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