Claymie Time
Jamie Stratford Makes Tiny, Funny, Occasionally Unhinged Claymation Featuring all Her Favorite Ojai Things
PHOTOS OF JAMIE STRATFORD BY NICHOLAS WEISSMANA ball bounces into the middle of the frame, and from it springs a little clay woman; bob-haired, blond, blinking. Another ball drops into her hand from over her shoulder. She catches it and spreads it out into the words “Claymie Time,” then cheeses for the camera.
It may remind you of something.
Remember Penny, the claymation girl with pennies for eyes, who lived inside Pee-wee's Playhouse, Paul Reubens' 1980s Saturday-morning fever dream? In one episode, Tito the lifeguard, played by a very muscly Roland Rodriguez, finds a penny at the bottom of the pool and hands it up to Pee-wee. “Wow! A lucky penny,” he says. Then that laugh.
A lightbulb appears. “That gives me an idea,” says Pee-wee. The screen wipes, two pennies come in and clink together, two little clay arms reach up and rub them open into a blinking pair of eyes, then those arms build their own face and body, and finally pull out two blond pigtails. And there she is. Penny was voiced by eight-year-old Anna Seidman and animated by the studio that later made Wallace and Gromit. The shorts were stories Seidman would tell from her life — or just make up — sweet stuff like planning a slumber party or visiting the Tooth Fairy, but with little salty twists. In one, Penny lists every animal a friend dubiously claims to have eaten, including nine cockroaches, three blue jays, two guinea pigs.
And you watch that friend devour each one down to the skeleton.
Jamie Stratford cites Penny as an early inspiration. You can see it. Her own claymation work is similarly adorable, and then, every so often, there’s that delicious salt.
Take the duck and the Shar Pei. A duck places a Shar Pei dog on an ironing board. The dog lovingly slurps the duck’s face and the duck begins to helpfully iron the wrinkles out of the dog. Then irons more, a bit too much, and once he’s pressed totally flat, she folds him into a paper airplane and sails him straight at you.
Jamie's first stop motion was a “Barbie movie,” made with her sister, the now video artist Jennifer Juniper Stratford, and their best friend Marisa. They planned shots, built a set between their Bert-and-Ernie twin beds, and paid for film and processing with babysitting money. The setting was a Chippendale’s and the cast included a shorn Marie Osmond doll and another doll from the original 99 Cents Store on Fairfax and 6th. They cut and spliced it in 5th-period Film Class at Fairfax High in 1991, and worked on it for a year.
Jamie was born in Colorado, moved around a lot, but has been in LA more or less since she was three. She and her mother landed in Santa Barbara after high school, where she enrolled at Santa Barbara City College and took all sorts of classes, not much of it art. A lot of it was marine science. She became a dive tech and spent a good chunk of time underwater around the Channel Islands.
It was in a now-defunct Goleta hobby store called Craft Essentials, that she found her inspiration. Jamie saw a flyer for a “Miniatures Club,” pulled the number off the bottom, and signed up. It ended up being her and several women decades her senior crafting very small things. She learned to build a pie from a bottle cap and a bag of popcorn out of jalapeño seeds. Like Pee-wee when he sees that penny, it lit a lightbulb in her brain.
She picked stop motion back up around 2019 on her phone, using an app called OSnap!, before upgrading to a Canon SLR and Dragonframe, software made by an Ojai local. She doesn’t do a lot of storyboarding; the idea for a video just comes to her, often out of some tiny object she’s found or borrowed. The ironing board in the duck and Shar Pei video, for example, was borrowed from Ojai artist and production designer Jennifer Jordan Day. She shoots overhead and straight-on, spending a day or so per piece, each averaging about 15 seconds. She’s made over 360 videos, and says she’s still learning something new on every one.
She’s become very good at sculpting animals; especially sea creatures, probably because of all those marine science classes. A humpback whale takes a bath. An axolotl drinks a Coke. A pygmy seahorse eats spaghetti. An anglerfish swims through space. Blue octopi recur, often simply dancing in mismatched shoes, or serving a PSA about cleaning up after yourself. She works in Jovi Plastilina, a plant-based modeling clay great for children. It stays soft, so she can work a figure all day. A character is usually usable only as long as the shoot lasts. They warp, they get mushed. Or, like the Shar Pei, they’re fully destroyed as part of the show. But Jamie doesn’t waste anything. Once a character can’t be used, it goes in a little pile on a cart. Then if she needs, say, a bit of yellow clay, she might pull it off the head of a retired Claymie or some lemon.
JAMIE IN HER HOME STUDIO
CHARACTERS IN THE SALVAGE PILE
In her mid-twenties, Jamie enrolled at UCSB on a teaching track, but before she ever taught a class she got recruited to teach English in China. She’d just met Joe Rockwell. It was supposed to be a summer fling, and she was already scheduled to ship off overseas, so almost offhandedly she asked if he wanted to come. He said yes.
Joe followed her to Chang’an. They were there a couple of months, often the only Westerners around. It was a wild experience, both personally and professionally. Jamie was rotated class to class with no set curriculum and no materials, roughly fifty kids at a time, running purely on her sweet disposition. The other teachers went by English names, one of them Bubbles. Jamie picked a Chinese name that phonetically mimicked her own: Xiǎo Mǐ, which means “little rice.” Joe was Noodles.
Back in the States, Jamie and Joe rented a little red caboose on a property in Toro Canyon, tucked into an avocado orchard. It was tiny, but it had a real kitchen. They slept in a lofted bunk bed. Jamie and Joe stayed a year, then moved elsewhere in Santa Barbara. In the meantime Jamie secured a position teaching first grade at Harding Elementary in Santa Barbara.
At Harding, claymation is part of the kids’ STEAM studies. STEAM is STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) plus Art. It works, Jamie says, because “stop motion is so easy.”
She says this as a person for whom stop motion, which takes an enormous amount of patience, is easy.
Succulent Zoo is Joe's project, a "botanic menagerie" of toy animals fused with succulents and cacti, so plants erupt out of the toys as spiky, colorful limbs or elaborate hair styles.One of the videos she made with her students, in collaboration with the music teacher, Ms. Young, greets visitors to the school’s home page. The kids sing the school song: We believe in kindness every day / We love our school in every way, and it looks like everyone got to create a piece. It’s chock-full of pencils and rainbows and birds, and little self-portraits in clay.
Jamie and Joe landed in Ojai by accident.
Their apartment had sold in an expensive year to be moving. They were pretty well priced-out of Santa Barbara and hadn’t quite clicked with Ventura. But then, driving back from the Rose Bowl Flea one Sunday, they stopped to look at a house in Oak View. That one wasn’t it, but it got them thinking about the Valley. “We got lucky,” Jamie says.
They moved in 2022, bought a house, and began making themselves at home in the community. Jamie commutes to teach in Santa Barbara, and Joe brings Succulent Zoo to most of the regional craft markets; you may have caught him at the recent Backwoods Bazaar at the newly opened Ranch House. School started last week, and she’s got a fresh class of first-graders. “I'm always excited and anxious about meeting all the new little personalities,” she says. “My new little family!”You may have caught Jamie’s collection of necklaces she wears to class at a recent Ojai Valley Museum show, Ojai Collects the Holidays.
Their home is full of art and surprises and incredible thrift hauls.
There’s Chairry, the big armchair from Pee-wee's Playhouse, or a replica of her, that Jamie found on the street near Harding before an in-service day. It wouldn’t fit in her car and she didn’t want to leave its side for fear it would get snatched, so she got a co-worker to bring her SUV. It wouldn’t fit in that either. The co-worker called her husband, and his truck brought it all the way to Ojai. The house it sat in front of was in the process of being sold, so she couldn’t knock and ask, and she still wonders about the chair’s story. Found at one of the MO STUFF quasi-annual yard sales is Chester, the knitted, balding, horse-like creature sitting at their dining table where he has a permanent seat, forever eating a fake pancake that came from Poshmark. In the hallway, there’s a painting Jamie made of her niece's stuffed monkey perched on, and painted over, a found painting of a turkey. A china cabinet from her mother that lives in her studio now houses toys and pieces of toys, the ones too small or too sentimental to end up in Joe's Succulent Zoo; which is also abundantly represented in the home’s décor. There's plenty of work by other artists, too, including a couple of Christopher Noxon paintings and prints.
JAMIE AND CHAIRRY, FOUND ON THE STREET NEAR HER SCHOOL
JAMIE’S HAND-PAINTED PORTRAIT OF HER NIECE’S STUFFED MONKEY
CHESTER ENJOYS A PANCAKE BOUGHT FROM POSHMARK
JAMIE OUTSIDE HER HOME IN OJAI
And since settling in, Jamie has been making Ojai, one business at a time, in clay.
Before a movie at the Ojai Playhouse, you may have caught a pre-show video of that recurring blue octopus eating eight fistfuls of snacks. The music is by VORTEX contributor Mikael Jorgensen, and his son Milo sings: When you're finished with your snacks / put it in the trash / in the back.
She made another with Jorgensen, this time about Playhouse snacks, that featured the Ojai Trolley. That got the City’s attention. Staff reached out to Playhouse owner David Berger to track her down, then commissioned her to make a video for the City’s new app: a mountain lion steps up to lodge a formal complaint about a tripping hazard on the Arcade sidewalk.
She’s done so many videos. Community Juice, Pinholita, BAKE., Lupa Bags, Queers in the Valley.
And now, she’s put a bunch of Ojai in one video, for VORTEX.
A spiral-eyed Claymie tumbles inside a spinning cloud, the Ojai vortex itself, spun from wool that Ojai artist Joel Fox gathers by the bagful at the Ventura County Fair. It was hard to tame, Jamie says; she got it under control with a flat iron. Then, things start popping out of the wiry maelstrom; some of her favorite Ojai things: a bag of popcorn, a cup of Pinholita coffee, a pixie tangerine, the Ojai Trolley, a tiny Jennifer Jordan Day, a crystal, a basket of farm-fresh produce, a BAKE. pie, a tiny Joel Fox, an acorn, a Succulent Zoo gorilla with a cactus for a head, a horse, a plate of pastries, Community Juice’s smiling red fruit mascot, a leather fish purse from Lupa, and, finally, an Ojai Playhouse chocolate bar. Some of these items actually survived their other shoots and are back for that rare second life. Then everyone, Jamie included, gets spat out over a pink Christopher Noxon Awha’y landscape.
Enjoy! (And yes, Jamie’s available for commissions.)
