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A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Ann Course produces frighteningly funny animations of simple line drawings. Influenced by American artist Philip Guston, Course's images skim along an edge of hilarious cruelty. Non-narrative, each video has a distinct theme 'mortality, the life of the artist, family trauma' cut superbly to punk or smaltzy instrumentals like "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" by Klaus Wonderlick. "Ann(i)mated" presents a three-minute life story where a mother beetles about, morphs into a bunny with throbbing private parts before melting into a swollen weeping head. Faceless figures fuck like rockets and a swaddled baby moves in and out of the oven. Like Louise Bourgeois, Course works through emotionally charged autobiography.

In Night Beast, a Rorschach blot vibrates to a horror soundtrack as Course's primary school photograph flashes from its centre. 'I don't really think about animation, Course insists. 'It's difficult to get people to look at drawings. People like to watch things twitch. So immediate and easy." Graphic, lyrical and wistful, Course takes a genre that is becoming too digitally smooth for its own good and pumps fresh and hopeful blood back into it.

Cherry Smyth, 'Drawing on Experience', Dazed and Confused

Filmography (all videos are made with Paul Clark)

	Rotting Artist, 2002, 3 minutes 10 seconds, sound, video People try it on in the Croxley bunkers, and when the head of the household shoves his bendy cane brush right up the chimney we would do well to run to the other side of the road and watch it appear out the top for the lucky sight of it.
	Black Magic, 2002, 2 minutes, sound, video "Poor people are poor people and they don't understand. A man's got to make whatever he wants and take it with his own hands. Poor people stay poor people and they never get to see, some ones got to win in the human race and if it isn't you then it has to be me."
	Ann(i)Mated, 1993, 3 minutes, sound, video Opening with mother's bulbous undulating vagina protruding from beneath her dress, child in arms. "To begin to start could never happen, to start at the beginning could be the end."
	Prince, 1999, 1 minute 10 seconds, sound, video Sonny's oral fixation.
	Me, 1999, 1 minute, silent, video People who have best friends are idiots.
	Untitled (Night Beast), 1999, 1 minute, sound, video Poor little sick tot terror, ink blot flick. Warning: This film contains strobing effects.
	Waiting for Waste, 2000, 3 minutes, sound, video Paul and I are at the pipe, waiting for waste.
	The Artist, 2000, 3 minutes, sound, video The artist is a buffoon on its way to an unsure place. The buffoon has no fans but can get blotto tonight. Starring the artist 's mother and fathers.
	Mother, 2000, 1 minute, sound, video Mother is a human being but sometimes it doesn't seem like it.
	Recruitment Video, 2000, 2 minutes 30 seconds, sound, video Hate it all head stomping for the good of all. Contains amazing stage dive.
	Shit Belt, 2000, 3 minutes, sound, video The playing fields of Durrants School marked the green belt around London, designed to arrest development. Life was always the same. A man I admired had a shit belt. Provokes associations between factory work, human excreta and nazi iconography. Or does the swastika here retain its older allusion to the circle of life? The drawings are rudimentary and deliberately unseductive. The mood is despairing and gay at the same time.

Ann Course biography

Ann Course was born in 1965, in Watford. She studied at the Royal College of Art, is a practising artist and lives and works in London.

Paul Clark biography

Paul Clark was born in Ilford in 1965.

He studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic, and then at the Royal College of Art.
He lives in London with his partner Ann Course and is a practising painter and musician.

Previous exhibitions and screenings include:

'Connected Images', Tanya Rumpff Gallery, Haarlem, The Netherlands, 1 June -13 July 2002.
'Other than Film', 'Watch Them Act', 'What (is) cinema?' International Film Festival Rotterdam, TENT Centrum Beeldende Kunst, The Netherlands, Jan 25 - 3 Feb 2002.
'By Hand' Hales Gallery, Deptford, London, Jan 18 - Feb 23 2002. 'New England', Lux Gallery, Hoxton Square, London, 9 Aug - 9 Sept 2001. 'Girl', The New Art Gallery Walsall, West Midlands, 20 May-9 July 2000.
' Girlish' touring video programme, The New Art Gallery Walsall & Lux Centre.
'Sweetie, Female Identity in British Video'The British School at Rome, Italy, 16 Mar-16 Apr 1999.
Image Forum Festival 2002, Park Tower Hall, Nishi-Shinjuku, Tokyo, April 27 to May 6 2002, (Also toured Kyoto/Yokohama and Fukuoka.)
International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 'Catastrophe', Germany, May 2 - 7 2002. 'Art + Animation, International symposium', Tate Modern, 16-17 March 2002.
International Short flim Festival Amsterdam, 'Digi-Tal' , 08-11 Nov 2001.
Impakt Festival, Impakt 2001 Highlights programme, Panorama Programmes, 'Clash or Jam', 'Souterrain', 'What Is To Be Done', Centraal Museum in Utrecht, The Netherlands. 02-08 Oct 2001.
Pandæmonium Biennial of Moving Image 2001, 'PANDEMIC 01 highlights programme, 'Living Dead'

The Lux Centre, 9-21 Oct 2000. 'Slacker Attitude'; 'Wannabe Maybe Not ', Arts Council & London Electronic Arts ICA, London, Nov 1994.

Forthcoming exhibitions and screenings:
'25hs' Barcelona May 9th 2003
'A Century of Artists' Film in Britain' Tate Britain curated by David Curtis, Nov 2003 -Jan 2004