Katherine O'Connor

Katherine O’Connor originally studied a B.A. in Animation at the University of Humberside and Lincolnshire. Graduating in 1999, her independent short films have been screened all across the globe. Katherine now teaches animation at Teesside University specialising in 2D animation and stop-motion.

Currently studying a PhD her work explores primarily the themes of corporeal and incorporeal, time and temporality with a focus on ‘the uncanny’ and links to spaces of ‘otherness’ brought together through the animated form.Katherine trained as a taxidermist in 2014, and is now a member of the Taxidermist Guild, this general fascination with the traditions of taxidermy and its attempt to bring to life the dead through traditional mountings, “whether an apparently animate being is really alive or… whether a lifeless object might not be animate” (Jentsch, 1903), lead to her fascination with concept of ‘the uncanny’.  This combined with animations unique relationship with time and ‘liveness’, the haunting of the uncanny within animation and our own psychology, along with animations creation of spaces of ‘otherness’, the recognisable, yet unfamiliar reflection of our world leading to the unheimlich doubling beyond the screen.