For the final iteration of ‘aemi online’ of 2020, we are thrilled to present Goodnight by Irish artist, animator and filmmaker Orla McHardy. Considering what has been a complex, inundating year to say the least, Goodnight is a reminder of the value of stripping back the excess and zoning in on what bridges life and death; moments that circle around in the mind as well as in life itself. Much in the same way that Goodnight extends the formal language of animation, Fanny Howe’s introductory text is an expanded, poetic perspective on Orla’s unassuming, quietly epic film.

Introductory text by Fanny Howe

Blue is strong and even elastic especially in this little film where blue is painted alive and potent.

Scientists and mystics alike tell us we are all one, but everywhere we look, we see the spaces and separations between things.

Blue breaks from blue but wishes it hadn’t. The yearning for fusion is demonstrated in a painting where the paint has to create perspectives that don’t exist as dimensions.

Are we all one? I have glanced at windowsills with flowerpots on them and seen nothing but the lines that divide the leaf from the sky and the pot from the glass.

In this film it is blue from blue with the yearning continuing. It is as if there can be no future without the desire for it. The future is in front of us, so close at hand it looks like the present.

But the future is still desiring the present as the present desires the future and they cannot touch.

I don’t think we are all one, but are almost one and this is life, the stretch and quiver of blue atoms. The desire to be subsumed.

The infant, unborn, puffs, squirms, listens for quite some time before being ejected into the air, the umbilical cord, blue and shining, the last rope linking the womb to the baby.

No more fusion. Gone forever. Why do we fear aloneness when the breath leaves us?

We have already been there.

And should have gotten used to the separation because the separation is what gives us this perpetual desire and makes us move and seek a future. Our potential is poised to feel joy.

This film knows that.

For the final iteration of ‘aemi online’ of 2020, we are thrilled to present Goodnight by Irish artist, animator and filmmaker Orla McHardy. Considering what has been a complex, inundating year to say the least, Goodnight is a reminder of the value of stripping back the excess and zoning in on what bridges life and death; moments that circle around in the mind as well as in life itself. Much in the same way that Goodnight extends the formal language of animation, Fanny Howe’s introductory text is an expanded, poetic perspective on Orla’s unassuming, quietly epic film.

Orla McHardy, Goodnight, 2020, hand-drawn animation, 8 min 24 sec

Screened: 9 December 2020 - 9 February 2021

Additional Information

www.orlamchardy.com