Penumbra

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.

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

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 study in contrast, colour and moiré pattern in a public park in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. The film connects with a series of paintings by visual artist, Angela Allen.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

White Light consists of extreme close-up shots of chrome bath taps and their reflections, including the camera lens, which becomes its own subject, as it closes in on its reflection. This material is mixed with rotoscope animation, created on various surfaces including cel and hand-made paper, where scratched lines are lit from an acute angle to create an image from light and shadow.

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 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.

The work is a double film loop for 16mm film projector, silent, indefinite duration. Two identical loops, ten seconds long, but one shorter than the other by one frame, run through the same projector. Every ten seconds the conjunction between the two loops changes by a frame, generating shifts in the moiré patterns generated by the superimpositions. It takes forty minutes (240 frames x 240 repetitions) to exhaust all the permutations.

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

A sequence of short films, each based on a dominant colour. Extensive use of time-lapse and frame by frame filming generates scintillating juxtapositions of light phenomena. Filmed in north west Umbria.

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

Double Fence was shot from the balcony of a B&B in Porto Potenza Picena , on the Adriatic coast near Ancona . The work explores the changes that occur with slight shifts in framings of the same scene, and the dramatic alterations in light, colour , space and movement between early morning and late afternoon. The work is the third in a series that records spontaneously occurring moiré patterns and related phenomena. The multifarious birdsong emanates from a nearby animal and bird sanctuary.