Catherine Prowse and Hannah Quinn, Laymun, 2017. 4 minutes, 42 seconds. Compositions and sound design by Kalle Jurvanen. Courtesy of the artists.

London based director and animator Catherine Prowse and illustrator and animator Hannah Quinn bring experience in model making and illustration together to examine the communicative powers of paper. Using paper’s sculptural potential, they bring attention to the tactility and materiality of their chosen environments. Whether depicting the vulnerable state of today’s wildlife, the auditorium of the Royal Opera House, or an animated pop-up book, Prowse and Quinn build landscapes of emotional and physical experience varied in dimensionality, texture, shape, and line.

In Laymun, a woman offers potted lemon trees to her community: people huddled in groups or hidden behind shut windows amidst a Syrian war zone. The characters, composites of rotoscoped cut-outs, inhabit a crumbling paper city rendered in muted colors as though coated in dust from the destruction of war. The yellow and green of the lemon trees serves as a hopeful tether in this bleak environment. Meanwhile, delicate graphite lines against opaque shapes of paper provide an expressive, intimate view of the protagonist as she adjusts to her shifting reality. Prowse and Quinn’s paper creations, vulnerable to rips and creases, but fibrous and resistant, simultaneously embody destruction, precarity, and hope.

To see more of the artists’ work, check out Prowse’s website here and Quinn’s website here.

To submit a video proposal to our online gallery, please email Isabella Kapur, Curatorial Assistant, at ikapur@drawingcenter.org, including a brief description and a video link.