Each year the Frostic School of Art and the Richmond Center's Exhibitions team selects a regional, national or international artist to act as juror for the annual student exhibition. This year South African artist Naomi Van Niekerk juried the student exhibition from afar.  Carefully looking through student submissions via the online platform SlideRoom, Naomi selected nearly 100 works from a total of approximately 300 submissions. Check out Naomi's video message below! 

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Naomi van Niekerk (b. South Africa, 1984) is a hybrid-media artist and works in film, theatre, installation and print-making. Her extensive training and work in puppetry equipped and inspires her to breathe life into inanimate materials, albeit objects or liquid powder, that is animated frame by frame using a camera. 

 

As a stop-motion animator, Naomi creates short films of haunting poignancy and power based on sensitive interpretations of stark, South African narrative poems that speak to her. These short films have been screened at numerous international festivals and received widespread acclaim such as the “Best First Film Award” at Annecy International Film Festival (for An Ordinary Blue Monday) and selection for the International Program at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen for My Mum's Bonkers. The Alchemy of Words, a theatre production about Arthur Rimbaud that combines sand animation and live puppetry and music is still on tour two years after its original staging and was also performed at the Festival Internationale de théâtre des Marionnettes in Charleville-Mézières, France. Naomi started work on her latest film, Box Cutters, at the Cinémathèque Quebeçoise in Montréal in 2018 and is currently also developing a new VR project titled Two Worlds, which won the Digilab Africa competition in 2018.

 

Check out Naomi’s website, https://www.dryfsand.com/