Amelia Kosminsky

‘An Illness Like Any Other…’ is a piece that looks at the real stories behind living with mental health difficulties. Amelia held interviews with 20 people who agreed to speak on camera about their experiences with mental health and then brought these stories together to create an installation to show the human side of living with these difficulties day to day, which is something Amelia experiences as well.

The title comes from a letter that Van Gogh wrote to his brother after being committed to an asylum saying “I have discovered that madness is an illness like any other”.

The piece was staged in a room which was designed by Amelia to give the feeling of a quiet, peaceful and reflective space to allow room for the stories to breathe. Whilst usually found in ecclesiastical settings, stained glass windows have historically been used to tell stories via light and this seemed to be the best way to tell these stories.

‘An Illness like any other…’ was originally workshopped as the final piece of her degree at Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

The Lark Descending is a piece that Amelia made for an internal project for Guildhall School of Music and Drama. The theme for the project was ‘Life but not as we know it…’ and her interpretation of this was flowers blooming in moonlight rather than in sunlight. They were tasked with designing a piece that would work across automated screens that moved as we directed, but would allow the design to work at different heights and depths.

Amelia wanted to strip the piece right back to create a piece that was slow and with very little effects to allow people to focus on the naturally beautiful presence found in the flowers blooming.

She set this piece to a shortened version of The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and it was shown in Silk Street Theatre in 2019.

Beasts of London is an exhibition for the Museum of London that was created in collaboration with Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Guildhall Live Events. The multi space exhibition walks you through history looking at London’s relationship with animals from PreRomans up until Modern Day. Under the creative lead of Dan Shorten and Tom Downing for the scenic design, they worked together to bring the exhibit to life.

Amelia’s role was to design the Carousel room for the Beasts of London Exhibition. The horses ran through history from Tudor times through to Modern day, with six different designs per historical horse. Using images from the Museum of London’s archive collection, she used the style of Muybridge to make each horse transform from a single image to a running horse. Amelia also designed the elephant in the Circus room.

The installation was a multi department collaboration, from working with video design, through production management, scenic art, theatre technology and electronic music for the composition of the music, the large production team worked together for each space. This room was brought together by Tom Downing’s scenic design, Jon Armstrong and Tom Mackay’s lighting design and Nina Thoene’s sound design.

‘Black-and-white overlaid images merged and shifted on the screen overhead like well-thumbed postcards of quotidian life’, Erica Jeal, Guardian

‘Moreover the video backdrop created by Amelia Kosminsky was stunning. She had discovered a treasure trove of amateur monochrome photographs from Hungary throughout the C20, the Fortepan archive, which she combined superbly to match music and text. If I am honest sometimes these designs can just be bloody distracting. Not here though.’ https://athomehefeelslikeatourist.blog/contact

Hungariana was an event for the Barbican at Milton Court Concert Hall featuring the music of Bartok, Ligeti and Kurtag across three concerts on one day.

Led by Gerard McBurney, Amelia made a 6 hour video design to accompany Tamara Stefanovich and the Casals Quartet as they played selected music for the day. This slow moving and abstract black and white design featured elements of photographs by amateur Hungarian photographers. This allowed the audience to be led through Hungary through the eyes of the citizens.

The dance project was a devised piece created between the Guildhall Video Design students and Darren Johnston for a one day show in the theatre. The set contained a whole floor lake so that any projection would be reflected and therefore doubled to the audience’s eye. The project was styled around an idea of the greek philosophy ‘Temenos’ meaning a piece of land that is cut off from the outside world and becomes dedicated to a sanctuary. The performer Yan moved through the water to the soundscape and interacted with the video design.

The first section that Amelia created for the piece was equating the look of forest with stillness and architecture of a church. Following this, she created a back wall of scenery in the style of red firey walls. This closed until Yan disappeared into it.

Waddesdon Imaginarium was a site specific piece of video design created for Waddesdon Manor’s Winter Light festival in 2017. Working as a assistant designer to Dan Shorten for Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Amelia’s work was focused on the garden and birds section. The piece was created with each element of the design taken from the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor.