Ed Atkins is considered one of the most unsettling contemporary artists – as well as one of the most exciting. In this video, the young British artist shares how he works from written texts, and why melancholy is at the centre of his animated digital videos.

​

“I wanted to make videos that spoke a lot about the way that they were made, so that you never forgot the thing that you were looking at.” The holistic approach to making videos appeals to Atkins, who likes the fact that you don't have to decide on one single thing – you can write, perform, add music and animation as you please. Moreover, he feels that he chose the path of art, as “it’s the only place that I can imagine that I can bring all of these things together on my own in a room.”

​

“Building up an animation, for me, is not that different to building up a sentence – building up a narrative.” Atkins feels that writing – with its grammar and syntax – is at the root of how he creates his work. Language is the way he thinks, so “often an image will come out in the form of language, and that image will become manifest in the video.”

​

The characters in Atkins’ video works are “born dead” and “generated from emptiness”: “There’s something missing from that world, and from the characters that are in that world. The thing that is missing sort of defines it.” Loss, insufficiency, inability, failure and in particular melancholy play a great role in Atkins work, and are feelings that Atkins considers “the absolute bedrock of making things.”

​

http://blog-gammelgaard.blogspot.com/2019/06/ed-atkins.html