Cosgrove Hall Archive Inspires Supermedium Exhibition in Manchester
Skwigly
Slip through layers of celluloid animation into an exhibition that asks what it means to animate: to bring life to human-scale animatronics, or to a digital avatar crossing candy-coloured landscapes.
Install image, Petra Szeman, Towards a new monomyth_, QUAD, Derby, 2024
Supermedium will showcase commissions and existing work by Kelan Andrews and Petra Szemán, alongside items from the legendary Manchester animation studio Cosgrove Hall Films Archive. The artists’ new works are developed in dialogue with the archive that is home to items from some of the UK’s most iconic and beloved hand-drawn and stop motion animations – Danger Mouse (1981-92), The BFG (1989), The Wind in the Willows (1983-90) and Postman Pat (2004 to 2008) to name just a few.
Both artists blur physical and digital realms, working across video, sculpture, claymation, digital animation, augmented reality, and animatronics. Showing archive material alongside new commissions, the exhibition will open up a dialogue between animation – past, present and future. At a time when digital technologies often overshadow analogue processes, Kelan Andrews and Petra Szemán explore what can be gained by pushing the limits of both.
Alongside his life-size animatronics, new pieces for Supermedium see Kelan Andrews working with claymation for the first time. This labour intensive method of stop motion animation and use of sculpted and posable clay offers Andrews a new way to explore the various aspects of his lived experience, from performing mundane daily tasks like shaving in the mirror, to living with a chronic illness.
Andrews often makes connections between his daily routines, and at times formative moments and childhood memories. New sculptural works will incorporate recordings of his parents’ voices, sections of a model railway, and an unwanted vending machine appropriated from the artist’s place of work. The unilluminated window of the vending machine would confront Andrews with his own reflection whilst he waited by the lift for his day of work to begin. In the context of his wider work and the themes of this exhibition, a connection can be made between the window, the mirror and the screen as sites where identities, bodies and worlds collide, are created, shared and manipulated.
Petra Szemán is predominantly known for their video works that feature their digital avatar, usually found journeying through a mixture of real world footage and animated realms. Szemán’s avatar makes ‘Anime Pilgrimages’, visiting real life locations featured in animated films and tv shows watched by the artist and millions of others around the globe.
For Supermedium, Szemán will introduce sculptural elements into their work on a more ambitious scale than ever before. A new body of work will house video pieces within an installation that incorporates ceramics and large scale hand painted screens. These transparent screens will operate as blown up versions of the layers of celluloid artists have more traditionally and historically used to create animations. Animators draw background imagery, foreground objects and protagonists onto plastic sheets which are placed on top of each other. For Szemán there is something about the way animators bring ranging elements together to create rich worlds of stories and characters that speaks to the way we make sense of our own lived experience, piecing together observations, memories and sensations into a cohesive picture of our reality.
Visitors will be invited to carry out Szemán’s long held desire to slip between the layers of an animation. To look through the layers like the camera would, causing imagery to shift and align as you move in front and between the work.
Following the pioneering work of the likes of Cosgrove Hall, animation has moved from the margins to become a major part of our culture. Referred to as a Supermedium by theorist Debora Levitt, animation today is made with multiple processes including hand drawn illustration, posable puppets, AI, VR, CGI and various digital and post production programmes. It also appears in multiple different places from gaming and movies to advertising and mobile phone apps; blurring the boundaries between representation, creation and reality.
The works in this exhibition will invite visitors to consider the relationship between the real and the imagined. To consider what animated worlds at the intersection of experience and technology might teach us about how we perceive and shape the world and are shaped by it.
Supermedium: Kelan Andrews & Petra Szemán runs at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, from 11 October 2026 to 31 January 2027.