Bio

Lewis Heriz is a cross-disciplinary artist and filmmaker from Suffolk, UK, now based in Shropshire.

He comes to his animation practice from a background first in music and theatre, then grassroots music promotion. From the latter grew a decade-or-so-long stint in graphic art and illustration, with a heavy weighting on record covers  and poster design for labels such as Soundway, Sofrito, Strut, and Now-Again/Stones Throw, and artists such as the Sun Ra Arkestra. The ‘manufactured synaesthesia’ approach he applied to music visuals led him to see animation – with its fusion of sound and image through time – as a natural progression, and spent his MA at the RCA investigating an expanded approach to the form.

Jan 2024: I am working on two commissioned documentary projects; one to be finished this summer, the other in the early stages and ongoing. I'm not currently taking on freelance commission work, although I am interested to hear of any collaborations that may feel right, and always happy to chat with anyone wanting to discuss working together.

LH_Profile

Statement

I have come to see animation as an integrated system for thinking and making, rather than a single practice or product. The term 'animation' expands and contracts in context; sometimes specifically a repetitive mode of creating 'time-based art', in others an all-pervasive ecosystem of audiovisual techniques and technologies that our entire society engages with on a daily basis.

My current direction draws as much from artist's moving image as it does from more traditional notions of animation, and my interest in non-hierarchical collaboration is partly in response to the negative experience of individual competition associated with freelance labour.

My focus on physical, material and tactile process intensified during the sensorially-deprived period of lockdown in 2020. To hold materiality as being central to one’s day in a hyperdigital era is to appreciate the centrality of embodied cognition in being human: to recognise the temporal nature of neural structures whose organising principle is grounded in the relationship between the Here and the Now.

Agency is key to being an artist, just as it is key to being a human. My MA research has encompassed questions of loss of agency within the (current) digital economy, and has brought me to a belief that a rejection of pervasive trends of surveillance, extraction and behavioural manipulation in Big Tech is essential to maintaining a healthy relationship with the world; one that’s rooted in physics, material properties, embodied cognition, relativity, multi-sensory experience and genuine sustainability.

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PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE AND COMMERCIAL WORK

Select Clients and Collaborators:

Story Syndicate, PSHE Association, San Francisco Jazz Festival, Curzon/Artificial Eye, Bloomsbury, Open City Documentary Festival, Simon & Schuster, Serpent’s Tail, Dartmouth Films, Canongate Books, Soundway Records, Sofrito, Howling Hops, Stones Throw & Now-Again Records, Red Bull Music Academy, Strut Records, Analog Africa, The Heritage Arts Company

2023

Visiting Lecturer ▻ Informed Practice, BA Animation, London College of Communication

Animator ▻ The End of the World (dir. Ali Aschman)

2022

Animator ▻ STOLEN YOUTH: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence (dir. Zachary Heinzerling)

Animator ▻ Miles Davis, What's Love Got To Do With It music video (Dir. Irina Rubina)

Visiting Lecturer ▻ MA Animation, Royal College of Art

Visiting LecturerHandmade Film, Cambridge School of Visual and Performing Arts

Director & AnimatorDon Leisure feat. Gruff Rhys, Neon Drizzle (Hotel Shaboo) (First Word Records)

2021-Present

Art Director & DesignerFully Human (PSHE Association)

2010-Present

Graphic ArtistSoundway Records

Graphic ArtistStrut Records

2008-Present

Art Director & Graphic ArtistSofrito

Animator ▻ Ice Merchants (Dir. João Gonzalez)

Animator ▻ The Dog With Wings (7) (Dir. Sanjana Chandrasekhar)

Animator (Clean-up/Inbetween) ▻ Eating in the Dark (Dir. Inari Sirola)

Musician (Trombone) ▻ Help Me It's Dark In Here (Dir. James Cheetham)

Art Director/Graphic Artist ▻ SFJAZZ Summer Sessions, San Francisco Jazz Festival (postponed to 2022 due to Covid19)

2021

Director & Animator ▻ Promotional campaign for the publication of The Octopus Man by Jasper Gibson

2020

Graphic Artist ▻ Hundred House Coffee print collaboration


2018

Graphic Artist ▻ Agnes Varda: Gleaning Truths season campaign (Curzon Cinemas/Artificial Eye)

2009-2011

Art Director/Graphic Artist ▻ Now-Again/Stones Throw

EXHIBITED & FEATURED

2022

Official Selection, Annecy International Animation Festival, So Long (We Dreamt of This), Graduation Films Programme 1

Official Selection, Aesthetica Short Film Festival, So Long (We Dreamt of This), Artists' Film Programme 2

Official Selection, EFEA - Experimental Film East Anglia, So Long (We Dreamt of This)

2021

Royal College of Art Degree Show and screening event at the BFI Southbank, So Long (We Dreamt of This)

2019

2018

Hot Sun, Late Sun: Modernism Untamed, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles

Vinyl Factory (2) - Sun Ra Arkestra covers

2016

Rough Trade Solo Show, Nottingham

2015

AWARDS/SCHOLARSHIPS

2023

PLANTING, Animate Projects funded artist programme, Derby

2022

Awards for BEST EXPERIMENTAL SHORT and EXPERIMENTAL VISUAL APPROACH, EFEA - Experimental Film East Anglia

2021

MA Scholarship Grant, Leverhulme Charity Trades Trust (supporting attendance at RCA Animation programme)

2003

First Class (Hons) BA English Studies, University of Nottingham

EDUCATION

2019-2021

MA Animation ▻ Royal College of Art, London, UK

Dissertation: 'An Image, Moved: Time-Pressure, Performed Transcription and The Human in Handmade Film'

2019

Gateway Into IndustryAardman Academy

2003

BA English Studies ▻ University of Nottingham, UK

© Lewis Heriz 2024

All enquiries: [email protected]