The imperfect animations of Orysia Zabeida are drawn frame-by-frame from memory

Orysia Zabeida’s animation work might be incredibly intuitive, but it does also follow quite a methodical structure. The artist draws exclusively in a square format, creating grids of seven columns (like a weekly calendar) within which she draws out each of her looping animations in Procreate, frame-by-frame. She archives all of these moving experiments on her website with a large grid of simultaneous motion cycles that are all informed by, Orysia tells us, by “small systems and rules that allow for infinite variations”.

For Orysia, the act of redrawing her subjects with incremental changes is a way of slowing down and observing things up close. “Drawing, for me, is a form of meditation,” she says; her investigations into repetition and colour are an exercise in depicting the moments and things she wants to remember or collect. “My animations become infinite loops of memory I can return to: ginkgo leaves from Osaka, a moth I noticed on a walk or bubbles in my sparkling water,” she shares. These small square viewfinders into everyday moments of awe and wonder are often drawn from nature – a constant subject in the artist’s work and the site for her “biggest inspirations”.

Visions from the natural world have also informed the material qualities of Orysia’s loops. With bleeding inky colours and overlapping marks and lines, the visual style the artist has developed is as an intentional rejection of perfection. Given her process however, the artist is also inclined to find inspiration in things that are slightly less fluid and a bit more systematic: “didactic images, step-by-step instructions, and early studies of motion, like zoopraxiscopes”, she shares. “My influences range from Bruno Munari’s Supplement to the Italian Dictionary to Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies – especially the way sequences of still frames come together to create an understanding of movement.”