Project
Becomings
engage · learn · reimagine · grow
Reimagining recovery narratives following adversity
Animation
Exploring recovery through movement, process and transformation
In Project Becomings
Animation was used within Project Becomings as a creative way of exploring experiences and understandings of trauma and recovery through movement and change over time.
It formed part of the workshop exploring Keys, a theme developed by co-researchers to consider what might open or unlock possibilities for recovery — including people, practices, memories and material objects — alongside the barriers, closures and transitions that could constrain them.
Animation offered something distinctive within the range of creative methods used. Rather than producing only a static image or object, co-researchers could work with sequences, movement and transformation, allowing an idea to develop and change as it was viewed.
The animations later formed part of the Project Becomings exhibition, where they were played on a loop alongside the drawings within the Keys area of the exhibition.
About The method
Animation is a creative method that uses sequences of images, objects or movements to create the impression of change over time. Unlike a single static image, animation can show something forming, moving, unfolding, disappearing or transforming.
Within research, this can create opportunities to explore experiences as processes rather than fixed states. Ideas can be developed through movement and sequence, allowing attention to be given not only to what something becomes, but how it gets there.
Animation can also bring together different creative practices — including drawing, objects, photography, sound and digital media — providing flexible ways for participants to communicate ideas that may be difficult to capture through words alone.
Why Use Animation In Trauma And Recovery Research?
Trauma and recovery are not static experiences. They unfold across time and can involve periods of movement, repetition, interruption and change. Animation provides a way of exploring these experiences as processes in motion, rather than reducing them to a single moment or fixed representation.
The ability to sequence and transform images or objects can make visible how different elements connect, separate and re-form. This can be particularly useful when exploring recovery as something non-linear, relational and continually becoming.
Within Project Becomings, animation also created opportunities to explore recovery through doing and watching something happen. One co-researcher used animation to show an origami form repeatedly folding and unfolding, explaining that he wanted to “bring it to life” so the process could be seen in action.
This matters because the animation did not simply describe recovery. Movement itself became part of how recovery could be thought about — drawing attention to process, change and the different possibilities that emerge as elements come together in new ways.
What Did Animation Make Possible?
Animation made it possible to explore recovery as something that unfolds through action, rather than something that can be fully understood as a fixed state or end point.
One co-researcher, James, used his love of origami to create an animation in which a form repeatedly folded and unfolded into a stellated octagon. He described recovery as a series of seemingly simple steps that can be approached differently, emphasising that recovery was not something that could simply be learned from a book. Animation allowed him to “bring it to life” and make the process visible through action.
As the form folded, intersected and transformed, different possibilities emerged. The finished shape depended upon what had happened before, but was also something new. This provided a powerful material metaphor for recovery: past experiences remain part of what we become without entirely determining what becomes possible next.
Animation therefore did more than communicate an idea about recovery. Movement became part of the knowledge-making process itself, making visible how recovery might be continually made and remade through different actions, encounters and relationships.
