Julia Fernandez hand paints 300 ceramic tiles to create a mesmerising stop-motion music video

The Brooklyn-based artist and director Julia Fernandez has always been fascinated by animation techniques that celebrate physical materials and slow, thoughtful making. Much less enthralled by flat cartoons or static characters, the artist spent her entire time studying Interactive Media Arts at college focused on just how to “make things move and feel alive”, weaving animation into every project. It wasn’t until after graduating, however, that the artist got particularly stuck into clay. Discovering a free ceramics workshop at her local community studio space, Julia began to mould a very unexpected medium into a new tool for motion.

“I wasn’t interested in wheel throwing or functional pottery,” Julia shares, “but one day while making a cup, I painted animation frames on it and photographed it as a zoetrope. Seeing a material that’s supposed to be still and permanent begin to move felt like magic, like I had cracked some code in reality to create movement that should otherwise be impossible.”

Since then, Julia has continued to chase this same feeling of awe, and the animation technique she established recently expanded into the form of a three minute music video for Dirt by LA-based artist, producer and instrumentalist Emma Wellons (also known as Emory). When the musician first reached out to Julia for a handcrafted animation for the track, the song “resonated with me immediately”, she shares. “It expressed a deep, familiar sense of longing for person, place, or time, while also holding onto a quiet optimism for what’s to come.”

In order to create a unique visual language for the single, Julia embarked on a three-month-long project of handcrafting and painting 300 individual ceramic tiles to make up the music video frames, each with their own beautiful irregularities and imperfections in glaze. Structured in grids of twelve, these tiles were swapped out like puzzle pieces in the final stop motion, using zoetropes and evolving motifs to follow “the meditative rhythm of the song through repetition, noise, and texture”, the artist says.

Rather than planning every outcome (something pretty much impossible with ceramics), Julia was set on “allowing the material to shape the animation”, embracing the challenge of elements – such as the rabbits’ motion cycles needing dozens of unique frames. “I made each tile by rolling out slabs of clay, measuring, cutting, and carving images into the surface, then firing and glazing them,” Julia says. Since the artist couldn’t set up a permanent place to shoot with regular lighting in her shared studio, the frames took 12 weeks to capture: “every morning for about three months, the project became a daily ritual. I would arrive early to catch the sun and capture some frames,” she says.

As her longest animation to date, the video for Dirt required a real commitment to something all creatives have to face the discomfort of: trusting the process. “For many days, I stared at stacks of tiles, unsure if I could make enough to create sustained movement or a coherent emotional arc for a three-minute song,” Julia admits. Now, with the animation under her wing, Julia is working on a ceramic short film, continuing the exploration of beautiful rhythms and imperfections that arise from making motion ever so slowly: “The project taught me that doing a little each day will eventually get me to the finish line, even when the scale feels daunting,” she ends.