Animating the Interior By Nikē Baneberry

Layers - Intersectionality - Third Space - Animated Architectural Drawings

A flickering gif, where shaded black and white drawings oscillate and layer on top of each other.
Klau*doscope
This drawing flickers back and forth between the different closet spaces which derived from the root word Klau*. The closet and cloister stack and unstack to form this inbetween space: the cloinsular. The cloinsular is a third space, a communal space between separate from the home and the workspace. The cloinsular is the space for queers who have “come out of the closet” but still exist in sacred safe spaces hidden from the public view. The cloinsular is full of care and tenderness.
KALEIDOSCOPE

This textural writing is a kaleidoscope of images, words, ideas, experiences, refracting against one another to create a series of changing patterns and réunions. Kaleidoscope is the combination of the words -kal (‘kalos’ meaning beautiful), -eidos (‘oid’ meaning shape) and -scope (meaning a tool to see with). In calling these ideas a kaleidoscope I am stating my intention to create:

  1. ‘kalos’: a beautiful image conjured both in words, as markings in a drawing, and the depiction of a beautiful architectural space.
  2. ‘oid’: the crafting of a shape, both as the scrawl of pen on paper, a collage of shapes (squares, lines, circles) in an orthographic drawing, and within the edifice represented.
  3. ‘scope’: language, drawing, and architecture as instruments to see new possibilities.
PORMANTEAU

Portmanteau is the word to describe the mixing of sounds and words together to generate new diction. They represent the idea of combined concepts; such as ‘brunch’: breakfast + lunch. It is the word for a large stiff traveling leather suitcase. I think of the portmanteau as both of these things: a container for new expressions and concepts. I am fascinated by portmanteaus: linguistic blendings of ideas where language itself creates new meanings by reflecting words back on themselves. My last name Mantha-Blythe is derived from the same word manteau (Mantha): to cloak (as in a mantle). This cloak or manteau typically worn by women resonates in my gender expression. I have been cloaked by others with the gender ‘woman’; but I am not a woman, my gender has shifted away from this binary the same way Mantha has grown away from manteau, morphing into new words, combining with new words like Blythe (cheerful, kind), and in kind, I transform joyfully. The portmanteau is a lingual kaleidoscope. With the same playfulness that I spin around words and meanings, bouncing them back onto one another, my drawings also repeat and return in an optical performance. This approach to crafting text is a trans methodology: creating new ways forward by projecting myself off existing frameworks, traditions, histories, and personal experiences.