'I got tired of the relentless four corners of everyone's social media posts—and so the way to formally get around that, if you can't eliminate them, is to, you know; add about 10,000 corners to a work. Which seemed like a great approach, which I've stayed with, because what it allows me to do is activate the negative space. And the fact that the positive space is animated means that the objects—the pictorials that are animating on the foreground—are still defining and working to create a different animation with the negative space. And that I found intriguing and challenging. And so I continue doing it.'

—Lorna Mills

For the 22nd episode of Dutch Art & Design Today, I sat down with Lorna Mills, a Toronto-based artist whose digital artworks—often created from hundreds of hand-edited frames—are at once formal, frenetic, and unmistakably hers. Raised in Saskatchewan, she entered art through books and built a private museum in her imagination, guided at first by the World Book Encyclopedia and its arsenal of images. She later moved to Toronto to study painting, entering the art world through color, gesture, and pigment before moving into video, lenticular prints, and eventually digital media. Her early experiments with GIFs, both sourced and self-recorded, gave way to a meticulous visual language defined by animated collage, jagged edges, and looped visual rhythms that reframe how we see the internet—and ourselves—through a pictorial lens.

In this episode, Lorna and I discuss how her work emerged from formal training and evolved through the unruly spaces of early net art, artist-run spaces, and eventually blockchain platforms. We talk about her labor-intensive process—such as cutting individual frames by hand—and the way her animations interact with scale, whether installed across Times Square or released as intimate, square-format works on Tezos. Lorna also reflects on being part of the Art & the Blockchain exhibition at Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam back in 2022; where I first came across her work installed in a space, in person; as well as for instance her long collaboration with Transfer, and how she approaches pricing and accessibility across physical and digital markets. We speak about her sustained interest in pictorial composition, her refusal of minimalism, and her embrace of the internet’s raw, unfiltered abundance. Her work is as deeply informed by the history of painting as it is by the visual delirium of contemporary online culture—and in this conversation, that full spectrum comes through.

Read the essay 'The Digital Phantasmagoria of Lorna Mills'.

You can find Lorna on X ⁠@lm_netwebs and at her website ⁠LornaMillsImageDump.

You can find John on X ⁠@johnbezold⁠ and at his website ⁠johnbezold.com⁠.

'Dutch Art & Design Today' is published by ⁠Semicolon-Press⁠.

ISSN: 3050-6662