Notes on the film
you feel soft was produced during the artist’s time in the Animate Materials Workshop. The film reveals the broad versatility of the artist’s material partner through the use of varying forms of graphite: pencils, sticks, kneadable graphite putty, and water-soluble graphite pigment. Macro lens photography captures the vast range of detailed textures formed by the encounter between graphite and paper, creating tactile, sensorial experiences. Up-close and under the camera, the material takes on many appearances: the glistening, leathery skin of kneadable graphite contrasts with the coarse chalk-like strokes of the graphite stick, or the the flowing diffusion of water-soluble graphite. Sequences of drawn and erased graphite leave striated patterns on toothy paper, while frames of dry water-soluble graphite evoke the granulated streaking of watercolour paint.
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the many textures and variations of graphite are wholeheartedly embraced
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the many textures and variations of graphite are wholeheartedly embraced
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The many textures and variations of graphite are wholeheartedly embraced
The sequences cut or flow between abstract and representational imagery. At times the focus remains on pure form and feeling through material exploration, carving into pulsing mounds of kneadable graphite or observing shining drops of water-soluble graphite running down a page. Other moments depict illustrative scenes and figures, from stick-men drawn in familiar and nostalgic pencil scribbles, to a lonely powdered comet crashing to the earth.
Traces left behind, particles of graphite and smudges on a page
The film’s under-the-camera animation documents a dynamic relationship between graphite and its surface, as the artist often erases and draws over the same page, building lines and layers of material that leave embedded traces in the paper’s texture. References to intimacy and touch appear in flashes of embracing drawn figures and enfolding curves of kneadable graphite, but the film’s most prominent intimacy is between the artist and her material partner. Impressions of Kletke’s hands are revealed through finger smudges and a momentary glimpse of the artists’ photographed hand – the sole frame of colour in an otherwise monochromatic palette.
See more of Kletke’s work
you feel soft, as well as many of Cameron Kletke’s other graphite material tests with the workshop, is publicly available for viewing on the Animate Materials Vimeo page.
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