Expert Advice from Rosalyn Farney

by Nadya Kelly (MA 2023)

For alum Rosalyn Farney (BFA 2021), Berlin wasn’t just a destination for her Fulbright project—it was a creative catalyst.

While Farney was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), she gravitated toward monotyping, a printmaking technique that allowed her to experiment with sequences of slightly varying images. However, during her time at SAIC, she became curious about other disciplines, mainly animation, archival research, and gender studies, and how she might explore and connect them. 

After graduating from SAIC, Farney eventually applied to the Fulbright Scholarship program, and once granted the opportunity, Farney believed Berlin, known for its raw, experimental energy and thriving art scene, offered the perfect backdrop for her to bridge the disciplines she studied in school. Through her project Visionary Abstraction in Germany: Stop-Motion Animation and Transformative Archive, Farney conducted archival research that allowed her to delve into Berlin’s rich animation history, studying everything from silhouette films to the material construction of puppets and props. Her time as an artist in Berlin’s rich art ecosystem—its openness to process-based work, its history of pushing boundaries, and its community of makers and thinkers—shaped her work significantly, and continues to shape her work today even after the completion of her project.

“If you're an artist, connect with people who are in the sciences, or just different fields that maybe you see overlapping or connecting with your art practice.”

We spoke with Farney, who is now studying printmaking at the University of Texas at Austin's Studio Art graduate school program, about her Fulbright experience, her Berlin exploration, and her advice for aspiring interdisciplinary artists.

How did you come up with the research idea for your project?

Right after I graduated from SAIC, I started interning at the Art Institute of Chicago museum in the Prints and Drawings department, where I learned a lot about art history. Additionally, I was helping Rothman Family Curator Jay Clarke with research for one of her gender and sexuality seminars. One of her focuses is German art history, so I was learning more about German art history, too. 

When I came home from working, I would alter film slides, make collages on a small scale, digitize them, and then put those into a video format. I was also exploring handmade celluloid animation and looking into making things frame by frame. Then, I started to think about the overlap in these two practices, between archives and animation. I wanted the opportunity to research all of the things I was interested in—museum studies, animation, gender and sexuality, and art history. I wanted the chance to do it all at the same time and then see what the outcomes would be.

Tell us more about what you did in Berlin and what you studied during your time there.

While applying for Fulbright, I spent a lot of time reaching out to people in Germany in the areas that I wanted to study. I reached out to a museum that focuses on sexuality and the history of queer people. I reached out to somebody at an experimental film institute in Berlin, but once I got there, I started focusing more on the DEFA archive,  an archive based in Dresden which houses a lot of materials from DEFA Studios, which was the state-owned animation studio in East Germany. The curator there was very helpful and encouraging. I found someone who was very helpful to  the project and provided different resources that I might be interested in. I ended up going to Dresden a decent amount of times while I was in Germany.

Because I'm a process-based artist, I'm not making narratively representational work—I'm making stuff with a focus on materiality or experimentation. So, while I was in Berlin, I wanted to figure out how to make a storyboard that works for me. That turned into different experiments of cutting up things, re-collaging things together, and trying to make something that I could use as a springboard to then make the animation that I wanted to make.

What advice do you have for people who want to do something similar to what you’re doing now?

If you're an artist, connect with people who are in the sciences, or just different fields that maybe you see overlapping or connecting with your art practice. Those conversations, I think, tend to be really inspiring and give a lot of direction or a sense of what your position is as an artist, too. I learned a lot from the people in my Fulbright cohort as well and would recommend reaching out to other students in your class or cohort because community is everything. ■