Ladders, portals, and puddles: Tala Rae Schlossberg’s mixed media animations are sensitive analogue worlds

“My creativity has always been this kind of energy seeping out of me in everything I do. The projects I make are the buckets I invent to catch it all,” Tala Rae Schlossberg tells us. The visual artist or ‘real scientist of imaginary space’ (as she has coined herself on Instagram), didn’t study art formally. In fact, the early roots of her creative career in animation and video production started at Quest University in Canada, “a tiny liberal arts school in the mountains of British Columbia that no longer exists now”, she says, where she studied Maths.

“I love systems and form and playing with logic, so it makes sense to some degree with what I’m doing now. But I quickly found myself missing a creative outlet in my life,” she says. “The summer after my sophomore year I took an intro to animation course while I was home in Eugene, and that unlocked my creative practice in a huge way.” Finding in animation the autonomy to build her own narratives and express her innermost thoughts and ideas, Tala immediately fell in love with the process of working frame by frame and spending her days thinking about “time, rhythm and motion”, she says. ”It combines all of my favourite things – I get to make myself puzzles to solve and build new worlds.”

Tala continued to explore her love for the art of moving image taking on a role making videos at the The New York Times, before starting her own creative studio Two Toes. Co-founded alongside fellow designer and artist Kika Macfarane, the pair worked collaboratively on projects dedicated to visual storytelling for causes and brands such as Nature Conservancy, Planned Parenthood, Patagonia, and Substack. Now flying solo, Tala’s portfolio is fit to bursting with inventive mix-media animations, witty wordplay and sensitive interpretations of the beauty that she finds in all things that might be considered ‘mundane’ or ‘everyday’. The goal with her animation work of late? To “always surprise myself with something new”, Tala says.

To create a unique visual language for each animated piece, Tala can find herself starting out on a project in a number of different ways. For a recent music video for Martin Buttrich and Charles Levine for the track Festival Queen, the artist spent hours “making marks out of all different kinds of paint, stamps and paper”, and for her independent short Night In, she repurposed “a really bad roll of film I shot on a trip to the mountains in Spain” – the foggy appearance of which became a cornerstone to the film’s look.

Never starting out on an entirely ‘the blank page’, the animator often gives herself a set of warm up activities or sifts through a collections of things she holds on to for inspiration: “My favourite part of the process is getting to play with the pieces of my visual library after I create them. It’s like getting to explore a strange new reality made out of only things I love,” she shares.

That might be why her work is so incredibly fluid, or ‘mixed media’ as we might traditionally call it. “I like the act of turning old things into new things”, she shares, whether that’s tearing paper, constructing a scene of cut outs or taking a line on a walk with crayons and “other things that leave your hands very multicoloured,” she says. This toolbox of analogue tricks never tires in creating emotive and awe inspiring images that move. The only reason Tala doesn’t go digital and turn to her computer for these generative experiments is because “you become limited to activities that won’t break your computer, which is a pretty tight constraint it turns out”.

Resistant to the idea of working in one set style – as we might understand ‘style’ in a conventional sense – Tala sees the set of visual principles that can come to define an artist’s output as simply a “way of seeing”. Everyone’s creative style is not in their output but rather in their methods – all our varied ways of doing things. Of course, there are things that Tala really likes, things that she often returns to in her animated work: the sky, the colour green, the texture of paper, imperfect and abstracted shapes. She adds to the lists: “ladders and portals and fields and puddles and birds and boats”. With a focus always on the message, idea or the story, creativity happens with all you’ve got.

“I think that this is one of the greatest joys of being an artist – to continue to discover and expand the bounds of your world,” Tala ends, “I am almost certain this will be a lifelong process of uncovering, and I’m almost certain I will like all of these things forever (unless I fall off a ladder or get lost in a portal or something).”