The visual world is a playground of perception. Films transport us into sprawling universes that examine the human condition. Photography freezes space and time into a moment. Design creates meaning and emotion thoughtful use of space, form, and material. Each medium comes with its own modality of storytelling. To a great extent, the medium becomes part of the message.
Animation works along the lines of worldbuilding and a suspension of reality. It distorts time, exaggerates expression, and gives life to the inanimate. But what it also does is give us a sense of that which lies between the lines; the subtext of lived experiences if you will. This is where Delhi-based artist Nonisha Negi's work thrives — at the intersection of movement and meaning.
An NID graduate, Nonisha is drawn to the interconnectedness of life; of patterns both visual and conceptual. And her creative voice comes from trying to interpreting these patterns through the medium of animation. From her stop-motion experiments to her 2D animations, she constantly searches for the underlying rhythms of life, teasing cycles that might otherwise go unnoticed. Her projects are not just visually compelling, they also challenge how we perceive time, identity, and transformation.
In a phenakistoscope, which is an early animation device that creates the illusion of motion by using a spinning disc with sequential images, Nonisha depicted the cyclical nature of existence where the lines between beginnings and ends dissolve. It took the form of a girl growing into an old woman and born again.
"Phenakistascope was the ideal medium for this since it has all the frames present in each frame, just rotated by a few degrees. Which is what I intended to communicate, that every moment is present in every moment. Time is spacious."Nonisha Negi
For her music video for Coast/Yahan-Wahan by Green Park, she animated sketches of oil pastels and overlaid them on video. The video-journal style montage embodied the themes of love, memory, nostalgia, longing and displacement. Her visuals captured the dreamy and bittersweet tone of the song evoking the feeling of distant yet vivid recollections.
Watch it below:
In her grad film, What We Talk When We Talk About Fruits, she turns an ordinary fruit market into a stage for animated gossip, where pears and bananas have conversations about themselves and their place in the world. It’s playful, absurd, and yet comments on something essential - being aware of our own consciousness as living beings.
Noniisha operates in the realm of abstraction, using animation not just as a storytelling tool but as a medium for visualizing the unseen. She gives shape to feelings that exist outside the confines of language and the patterns of life that can only be perceived over a period of time. Thought movements and textures born out of conceptual musings, she makes the intangible tangible.
Follow Nonisha here.
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