Cathartic Clay

Adam Elliot is an independent Australian stop-motion animation writer, director and producer based in Melbourne, Australia. His six films have collectively participated in over eight hundred film festivals and have received over one hundred awards.

Adam was born in Berwick, Victoria, and raised in the Australian outback on a prawn farm by his father, Noel, a retired acrobatic clown, and his mother Valerie, a hairdresser. He has two brothers and one sister. After the farm went bankrupt, Adam’s father moved the family to the city of Melbourne, where he bought a small hardware shop. A shy child, Adam was very creative and was constantly drawing and making things out of found objects. At college he was proficient at art, English literature, photography, drawing and sculpture. In this interview with Adam, we were interested not so much in the technical side of his work, but more about what he is trying to say to his audience through his art form.

You have coined the term Clayography or clay animated biography to describe your work. Can you explain what this is?

I created this term because I was struggling with ways to describe my technique and felt Clayography most aptly expressed my style. It is a combination of the words