Ruth Lingford is one of Britain’s foremost animators and a teacher of high repute.
Her first career was as an Occupational Therapist with mentally ill old people (and bringing up a family). She has been making short animated films since completing a BA in Fine Art and Art History in 1990 and an MA at the Royal College of Art in 1992.
In 1993 she was awarded an Arts Council of England animate! grant to make What She Wants (1994, 4 min), an experimental film about sex and shopping produced entirely on a home Amiga computer. After a 3-month Animator’s Residency at the Museum of the Moving Image, she received a Channel 4 commission for Death and the Mother (1997, 11 min) based on a Hans Christian Anderson story, another Amiga-based work which has won prizes at many international film festivals.
Ruth Lingford’s films are made using 2D digital techniques, often combining drawing and treated live footage. A typical example, Pleasures of War (1998, 11 min) made for Channel 4 and the Arts Council of England, is a retelling of the Biblical story of Judith and Holofernes, and explores female aggression and the links between war and sexual desire. It was devised in collaboration with the novelist Sara Maitland and again created on desktop computers. It is described in The Critic’s Choice as ‘one of the 150 best films ever made’.
She is known for ‘feelbad films’ which use the seductive medium of animation to draw the audience in and take them to uncomfortable places. An example is The Old Fools (2002, 6 min) is a film of a Philip Larkin poem, voiced by Bob Geldof, which looks at senile decay and the inevitability of death.
Her commercial work has included a 20-minute educational film on glue-sniffing, and extensive animation work on Peter Gabriel's Real World CD-ROM multimedia project, Ceremony of Innocence. She was a principal animator on Silence (1998, Halo Productions for C4), winner of a Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival and Special Prize at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival. In 2002, she collaborated with the Shynola collective on An Eye for an Eye (2002, 5 min 30 sec) a music video for UNKLE, which won the McLaren Award at the Edinburgh Festival 2002.
She has taught at the Royal College of Art, the National Film and Television School, the University of Humberside and the University of Wolverhampton. Since September 2005, she has been teaching at Harvard University as Professor of the Practice of Animation.
