Naomi van Niekerk is an interdisciplinary artist who works in film, theatre, installation, and print-making. She holds a BA in Dramatic Arts from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and a diploma in the art of puppetry from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts de la Marionnette in France. At the heart of Van Niekerk’s practice is the visual interpretation of poetic and narrative texts, and it is here that her myriad ways of working converge. Van Niekerk’s engagement with the printing press, for example, is similar to that of a photographer’s way of seeing – identifying, isolating, and capturing impressions of a specific image or moment, and replicating it in physical form. In addition to sand animation, van Niekerk makes use of scratch-on-film animation, which entails physical scratching into the layers of 35mm film. This technique of stop-motion animation, just as slight and deliberate as her process of working with sand, allows for a physical representation of time in the image. Working with film allows her to make sense of the visual narrative in all of its physicality and ephemerality. Naomi is based in Lille, France.