Film Categories: body

  • Gay Men and Hair Loss

    A look at the director’s fascination with gay men’s hair histories.

  • Clamp

    A sexually explicit experimental video. The goal of this work was to create an anti-pornographic work that celebrated marginal sexualities. The subject ignores the viewers’ participation in her pleasure, creating a hermetically sealed auto-erotic experience.

  • Site Visit

    Entirely hand-processed and hand-painted, “Site Visit” visually evokes a series of fantasy maps and the imaginary “sites” visited by following the paths laid out. Metaphorically the process of the film depicts the impossibility of concretely mapping disease in the human body, especially the emotional consequences. The degradation of the emulsion through bleaching is parallel to the slow degradation that occurs in the body stricken with cancer.

  • Myeyeye

    A self-surveillance video, shot in one take, exploring the limits of visual and aural perception. “The simple immediacy and eccentric austerity of the direct approach superficially contrasts with the abstract complexity of his other film works, but it shares their indeterminacy. The act of videoing is unplanned, a performance in itself, the results are fortuitous. In the silent Myeyeye the camera is the ‘wrong’ way round but the ear is clear, in focus, drawing attention to the act of shooting as much as any ostensible subject.” – Steven Ball

  • Letters

    “Letters” explores the transformation of painting through photography and the movement of light as music, text and body language. Formed through a combination of abstract hand-painted film and live photography, originated on super 8mm and 16mm, ‘Letters’ uses extensive optical printing and single-frame editing techniques to draw the material and structural properties of film into focus and create a sense of rhythm, gravity, weight and mass.

  • Root

    A notebook/catalogue of optical experiences, memories and thoughts composed of geometric and organic looking abstract images painted directly onto clear 16mm stock, interspersed with sequences of found footage. My first experiment in hand-painted film-making and optical printing, (painted in 1993 and edited in 2003) exploring the frame-by-frame interaction of contrasting colours, textures and shapes, and referencing Hans Richter’s ‘Rhythm 21’, Len Lye’s ‘Colour Box’, Stan Brakhage’s ‘MothLight’ and ‘The Flicker’ by Tony Conrad. Images from Root were used as source material for my other films Pour, Deluxe, Double, Radiator, SKZCP and Letters.

  • Enter

    A performance-to-camera video, composed in one take, reflecting my struggle for identity and order. Exploring the relationships between light and air, sex and food through a study of my mouth. Made using a similar process to the one that I use when optically manipulating hand-painted film, except in this work my body is the material. (RI)

  • Cold Tape

    Rapid-fire computer-composed abstract animation exploring difference, the interplay of opposites, and the impact of light on the body.

  • Walk

    A dance video exploring body movement as visual music and conduction. Made in collaboration with the Scottish dancer Vanessa Smith Influenced by the music of John Cage and Butch Morris and the choreography of Rudolf Laban.

  • Universe Energies Sustain Us

    A poetic video collage about light, air and language, the materials and processes we use to communicate and survive; exploring the translation and regulation of data by the body and technology; the aesthetics and consequences of error; the relationships of transparency and difference; problems of image order and presentation, identity, authenticity, feedback and loss, copyright and ownership, access and denial, time, space, speed and memory. Composed of recycled sequences of abstract animation and performance video (sourced from Cold Tape, Myeyeye, Enter, Island, Walk, Play and Letters), together with documentation of the imaging process, and incidental, ambient and appropriated material. Originally…