UAL Animation graduate Erin Tilly sculpts small polymer clay creatures named Dream Weaver, Bat Prince, Precious, Dragonfly and Plepple, each one a strange, adorable reminder that life is play and magic is available to anyone willing to step into it.
Observe the natural world long enough and the silliness becomes impossible to ignore. Animals doing inexplicable things, people worrying intensely about matters that will not matter, the whole beautiful absurdity of existence carrying on without anyone questioning it. Erin Tilly has been paying that kind of attention, and her polymer clay sculptures are the result.
Life Is Play is a series of small-scale creatures, fantasy beings imagined as reminders rather than ornaments. Dream Weaver, Bat Prince, Precious, Dragonfly and Plepple each carry a message about presence and awareness, what Tilly describes as real-world magic: the quality of experience available when you step out of your own head and into the moment.
“Magic exists in the real world,” she says, “and to experience it you have to believe you can step into it at any given moment. Get out of your own mind and get into the moment and you will find magic.”
The creatures embody that invitation in physical form, small enough to hold, strange enough to make you look twice.
Tilly graduated from UAL in Animation in 2024 and got, as she puts it, a little caught up with the imaginative practice of character creation and world-building. The sculptural work grew naturally from that background: the same instinct for giving form to imagined beings, translated into polymer clay and the particular intimacy of the hand-made object. The creatures are neither cute nor unsettling but both at once, which is exactly the register that makes them work. All life, as the project’s central argument has it, is incredibly strange and adorable.
Erin Tilly is a small-scale sculptural artist and UAL Animation graduate based in the UK. Her practice centres on tiny creatures and beings drawn from nature, observation and imaginative world-building.
ARTIST LINKS
erintilly25.wixsite.com/erin-tilly-archive
@dragonfly.archive
Life Is Play. Polymer clay sculptures: Dream Weaver, Bat Prince, Precious, Dragonfly, Plepple.
