Lines Fiction: Your animation “the way of life” is a masterpiece in short storytelling: Love, birth, death, break up, and coming of age told in 1 minute. Your animations are succinctly presented through drawings that are seemingly simple and inexpert. You also make sculptures and present space filling shadow or video installations. Do these different art forms have the same importance for your work?

Sebastian Pöllmann: I am strongly fascinated by puppet theatre because I grew up with my parents’ marionette theatre. My work is therefore mainly based on storytelling and creating new worlds you can immerse yourself. Drawn figures or clay sculptures are more or less puppets, telling stories. Playing with puppets allows a strong abstraction which never can be reached with reality. A drawing is always the beginning of an idea. This is where I start looking for other possibilities to present a story. It can be the clay sculpture, a computer based video installation or a shadow play. I enjoy this broad field of creative transformation. It is a completely different but additional working process. You will, however, notice my style of drawing.

Lines Fiction: Do you show your drawings and animations together in exhibitions or do you prefer to present your movies as single projections?

Sebastian Pöllmann: Both is possible. It worked quite well in the past to combine big lithographs with sculptures or showing a couple of drawings together with an animation shown on a TV screen. My decisions mostly depend on the available exhibition space. Shadow theatre or space filling video projections need a darkened room and are therefore mostly presented as single projections.

www.sebastian-poellmann.de/