Double Fence

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

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

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.

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.

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.

WATER WATER revisits the bathroom location of a previous film WHITE LIGHT (1996). It is based around a set of antinomies that operate at various levels, from between frames to between the two halves of the film. The black and white first part is composed of individually filmed frames (animation) which form shots of interlaced contrary motion that nevertheless can be read as sequences of individual frames, and/or in which alternate frames are lit in contrasting ways so as to emulate negative-positive juxtapositions. In the colour second half, dissolves replace cuts, light softens and contrast decreases. Continuity, by way of isomorphic features in the room, replaces the discontinuities of part one.

Silver Street was shot in a single day from my student house in Reading, Berkshire, where I studied Fine Art. Shots were made indoors and outdoors every hour. I adopted a shooting system using consistent framings, interspersed with variations. The film contrasts the interior personal space with the noisy street outside. - 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 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.

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.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Details, fragments, transformations and shadows of a confined space.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn