BEN ROLLASON

I was born in Huddersfield, England in 1973 and grew up in various towns around England, settling in London in 1992. Since 2008, I have lived and worked predominantly in Berlin.

My love affair with things visual began with hubcaps. Because it was the 70s, because car hubcaps were shiny and chrome plated, and because I was 2 years old, I liked to spend a lot of time staring at them. Later on, with the acquisition of a beat-up Super 8 camera, and after reading a book on the subject, I moved my aesthetic boundaries beyond hubcaps into the world of moving image, having decided to become a cartoon animator for Disney. Over the following years, I made plenty of little films, both animated and live action, including the utterly dreadful ‚Psychic Investigators Meet the High Priestess of Doom‘, a veritable affront to the art of film making.

Years later, I studied fine art at St. Martins School of Art in London, where I specialised in sculpture. I made large things out of cast concrete and stuff I found. After leaving art school, working in some rubbish jobs and living in a handful of London’s more dilapidated flatshares; a couple of twists of fate and a brief sojourn in the then burgeoning „new media“ industry, meant I ended up being an animator at Disney! Well Disney Channel. Things had become rather more digital since my early Super 8 efforts, but I took to it like a duck to water and was soon happily spending my days and nights watching progress bars crawl across the screen.

Since then computers got faster, the world went mobile, I got myself behind a camera more often, and ever since, I have been busily bringing the strands of what I do together. I like to bring together the fine art and conceptual side with the animation and CGI. I like to make things that are meaningful, funny, thoughtful or unusual, that move people, make them smile. Above all, I love ideas and the process of transforming those ideas into reality, using whatever I find to hand.

In my free time, I like climbing, swimming and playing guitar badly.