The window in the video is Amy Dickson’s, and has featured in her ongoing Window video series (2011-present). This is my more direct influence, though Dickson’s work sits in a long line of films and videos in which a window or windows are the focus, such as Jennifer Nightingale’s West Window, East Window (2013), John Smith’s Leading Light (1975) and Kurt Kren’s TV (1967); each of which have been an inspiration.
One of my first ‘shaky-cam’ vids, this work was inspired by Rose Lowder’s 16mm series Bouquet 1-10 (1994–95), which I first saw on VHS after I was given a copy by A.L. Rees. I already had an interest in the superimposed images Lowder employed through the work of Nicky Hamlyn, such as Panni (2005) and Red Green (2012), but it was Lowder’s interest in natural forms that inspired this work in particular, which was shot at Kew Gardens’ botanical house, using a tripod and a modified zoom lens.
Bouquet 1-10, Rose Lowder, 16mm, 1994-95
Hamlyn’s moiré pattern video series, in particular Zoetrope (2008) and Autogrill Varghereto (2008), began an ongoing interest in the optical phenomena of clashing graphic forms in video. At the same time I’d become more interested in video’s production through the progressive scan reconfigurations of Gareth Polmeer, such as Sea (2011). For Malha I was toying with the moiré patterns produced by videoing a mesh blind when I began seeing patterns that reminded me of drawing of film works such as Lis Rhodes’ Dresden Dynamo (1971) and Len Lye’s A Colour Box (1932). The initial intention was to make a segment for Portugal 16 (iPhone 6, 2016), but due to these developments while shooting Malha became its own vid.
Polkadot Dress, arrangement 5, 2019 (undocumented)
This series of arrangements came out of an interest in optical phenomena, particularly depth distortion. Simon Payne’s video Point Line Plane (2010) was a pivotal work, using very simple forms to create a complex perception of depth and space; and more recently, Hamlyn’s multi-projection performance 4 x 3 x 2 (2018), which takes this illusion into film performance. As my approach to making is quite different to Hamlyn and Payne in this case, I began making installations to be videoed, in the hope they would produce a similar effect. In hindsight, these works were heavily influenced by Annabel Nicolson’s para-cinematic performance Matches (1975), in which two performers alternate lighting matches in order to read two copies of an identical text about light, from in a dark room. Being introduced to ‘para cinema’, I questioned the prospect of ‘para-digital’ and ‘para-video’, which I feel this series aims to achieve.
This work was inspired by an email from John Smith titled ‘fan letter’, regarding Oscillating Fans (2016), an installation featuring an oscillating fan and a DLP projector producing a ‘rainbow’ effect. Video is made up of red, green and blue fields, and as a cost saving feature, DLP projectors flash each colour separately, though faster than the eye can perceive. Fast moving objects, such as rotating fan blades, disrupt this process, revealing the composite colours. Blow Fan is the most recent iteration, inspired by the wordplay of Smith which then inspired the entire show, and looks at more subtle colouration through Colour Correction (iPhone 6, 2015), a 90 minute slo-mo vid spanning video’s full colour spectrum from a colour correction wheel, starting and ending at yellow as a response to Hollis Frampton’s Lemon (16mm, 1979).