Lotte Cassidy

Lotte Cassidy is a London based illustrator and animator. She graduated from The Arts University Bournemouth with a first-class degree in BA (Hons) Illustration with Animation. During this time, she created award winning animations rooted in both memory and place. These include a Creative Conscience Award (2020), Short Focus Film Award (2020) and her animation ‘Fancy A Cuppa?’ was featured in the Glasgow Short Film Festival (2021).

Lotte has been recently featured on It’s Nice That (2022) and has illustrated award winning children's author Laura Dockrills book ‘You Are A Story’ (2023).

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Degree Details

I am a magpie.

Observing, collecting, drawing, chatting, listening and mapping to gather and extract information from the places, spaces and experiences around me before they disappear.

Like tiny fragments from a nest, collected moments, thoughts, happenings, encounters and conversations weave into a larger, linear narrative. Together they form a nest of traces, connecting past, present and future readings of the site.

My practice is concerned with remembering and recollecting the temporal landscape. I was awarded the Gordon Peter Pickard Drawing Prize (2022) where I visited Northumberland, using drawing to remember, reinterpret and interact with the landscape.

I am intrigued by the physicality of places, the layers of inherited memory and history that lie beneath the surface, using illustration and animation as a method to create empathy, connection and understanding.

Trailer — Found

Found

Magpies gather, watch and chatter. Their feathers ruffle in the wind. Inherited memories of the past are handed down into the present, as both voices are entangled in their calls and the nests they occupy.

‘Found’ is a short animated film that explores the history of the Foundling hospital, founded in 1739 as home to abandoned children in London.

Once a magpie finds a suitable home, they will stay there forever. Magpies remember specific human faces. Nesting above in the trees, they pass these memories down to their offspring. Through remembering the faces from the past, the magpies are the silent witnesses of the history of this site.

Drawing Scroll – Using a drawing scroll to remember and reimagine the past and present memories of the landscape, drawings and note taking overlap as each fragment merges into one.

Gordon Peter Pickard

In 2022 as a recipient of the Gordon Peter Pickard Drawing Prize at the Royal College of Art I traveled to Northumberland to explore different approaches to mark making as a means to remember, to walk, to listen and to map.

Through on-going visits to Northumberland by train, I used drawing in its expanded form as a tool to time-travel back and forth in the passenger’s seat through in-between spaces and shifting landscapes. Documenting, remembering and reimagining the space and relations between walking and grieving.

Digestive

'Digestive', born (2022) out of love of biscuits and chatting, is a monthly reflective publication from the Visual Communication BR13 studio at the Royal College of Art. We create content based on the collective theme of the month — designed, collected and shared on a single piece of paper.

Previous issues of Digestive include Digestive, Tunnelling, Leftovers, Collective Mapping and Crusty Sunburn where we explore the gut, crumbs of conversation(s), parasites, tunnel-vision, pockets, the weather, rock pools, tubes, ideal holidays, nostalgia and revel in the sharing of nan’s recipes.

Find out more: https://digestive.site/

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