Object Studies

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

The film is composed of receding planes in a landscape: a back garden and the houses beyond. The wooden lattice fence, visible in the image, marks the border between enclosed and open, private and public space, and forms both a fulcrum for the work and a formal grid by which the shots are framed and organised.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Ghost stories opens with a sequence of polemical shots: a mysterious shadow, an ambiguous advertisement which has deeper ambiguities unknown even to itself, and a lengthy quotation from Roland Barthes on the nature of autobiography. These opening shots outline the context in which I hope the bulk of the film will be seen: as a critique on so-called visual literacy, which is frequently based on a complacent mis-reading of images, and also as a rejection of film-biography, whose efficacy depends on such visual complacency. The body of the film consists of fragmentary views of the interior of a house, in which desultory activity occasionally takes place, sometimes in front of the camera, sometimes not. A ghost story is told, firewood is sorted.

Power Hub is a site-specific time lapse film shot over 24 hours in a disused bus factory in Maidstone, Kent, UK. The film was projected onto the window through which it was shot.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

A study of the TV as the bearer of images and as a scuptural-environmental object. The footage is extracted from an episode of the TV soap Brookside.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Panni is a visually arresting work in its formal structure and visual expression of colors. The subject matter of the film is a row of bed sheets flapping on a clothesline, drying in the wind. The colors punch through the screen as orange sheets flutter against a green backdrop of grass and trees.

A short shot made from a train traveling from south to north through East Croydon station is cut into three-frame sections, each of which is looped for ten seconds. Each loop advances by one one frame at a time. The looping process generates complex artifacts and kinetic illusions in the image.

Set in a particular location, a stretch of ‘white’ – unmetalled – road in Umbria. Structured around ordered and disordered features of the landscape.

Tobacco Shed is one of a series of films based on agricultural buildings, mostly concerned with tobacco production, in northwest Umbria.

Pro Agri is one in a series of films of buildings related to tobacco production in Umbria. It was shot over a two hour period from an hour before to an hour after sunset, at a rate of one frame every two seconds.

The work is constructed from shots of tidal seawater running over rippled sand and the blister pack for Amlodipine, a blood-pressure reducing drug.

The film is composed from thirty-second long time-lapse sequences, filmed in Northwest Umbria. Condensing days into seconds, Hamlyn makes use of lap dissolves and time-lapse photography to compress the temporal duration of the Italian landscape. The film invokes some pre-cinematic technologies mainly in the shadow plays where light and shadow manifest as the movement of trees, clouds, and other objects cast by the sun project and dance onto white walls and other surfaces, emulating and interacting with the film’s grain