Tobie Tse’s hand-stitched works turn crochet and lace into delicate animations

It’s not very often that you get musicians with gigantic careers championing textile arts. So when we saw Hong Kong-based multimedia artist Tobie Tse’s commission for Olivia Rodrigo we were stopped in our tracks, and subsequently tumbled down the wonderful rabbit hole of her beautifully animated artworks. A rare bridging of needlework and motion, Tobie’s pieces have left us in awe – particularly the ones that weave song lyrics and illustrations into antique motifs with delicate crochet grids.

“As everything becomes increasingly digitised,” she tells It’s Nice That, “I’m drawn back to rudimentary forms of animation and image-making.” In Phenakistoscope and Change, for example, the artworks are inspired by early animation techniques such as zoetropes (a spinning device that creates the illusion of a moving picture) and Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion. “Much of what I do is about re-contextualising these older methods in a way that feels new, while still retaining a sense of familiarity and paying homage to the history of animation,” she says.

Her process looks a little like this: crotchet panels begin as hand drawn sketches, laying out the structure of each of her compositions. From there, the process shifts into fibre arts, with Tobie stitching grids and borders entirely by hand then scanning or photographing them in order to animate atop digitally. “These multimedia pieces are a synthesis of my whole practice, combining image-making, craft, documentation and animation into one continuous workflow, offering a unified overview of the techniques I’ve developed and refined over time,” she says. The artist has since started to experiment with other analogue techniques such as cyanotypes and cross stitching, which she hopes to take into more mixed media motion projects soon.

As for her subjects, she often draws inspiration from the organic world: botanical patterns, birds and mythical star creatures that circle in a homage to La Danse by Matisse. Alongside these images, however, Tobie also enjoys translating music into her artworks: “many of my pieces incorporate lyrics from songs I love, ones that I find especially poignant. I feel compelled to create a visual response to them,” she ends.