Short Works With a Life of Their Own
Many of my shorts are published on Sedition Art (click the image opposite)
I started working with Sedition Art around 2015 when I got a call and was asked might I want to become a curated artist on that platform. By now, 2024 I'm currently the ninth most collected artist on the platform out of around 2000 artists. Some of whom are very well known. So at this URL you can find around 70 works. Please click the picture or this link Sedition Art and you'll see the extent of my current phase of work. Equally Long Form Artworks are an important area. Beneath, there's a few shorts that arose before 2015. |
|
Zagorsk 1992 4 minutes
It's 1991 and I've been to Russia a few times now - but our director goes down and I'm left to make up the footage he's missing. We've been near the border of Ukraine and Moldavia - and then back up to Leningrad/St Petersburg and Moscow. We have time spare so we go visit a KGB occupied Cathedral where the keep all the notes on 'the disappeared' which we've seen plenty of evidence of in the forests as townspeople had insisted we come see the unmarked massed graves of Jewish people... Meanwhile, the Orthodox church is noticeably on the rise - and we weren't yet to know it would become Nationalist - but the beauty of some of the places we went into - and this one which was stark and unadorned asked for a representation of all the above... |
|
On This Day The Eternal Flame Of The Chimera Burns Forever 2003 2 minutes 30 seconds
In Turkey, at Cirali, the eternal flame burst forth out of the rocks - and being a child affected by Ray Harryhausen's animations of Jason and the Argonauts and all those other mythic films - having found something that began so many myths, I felt the need to find a way to speak about that. |
|
One Second to Midnight 2006 3 minutes 15 seconds
One night I found myself wanting to make something - so I set up a camera pointed at a tv screen and said to myself, my rule is I will shoot for 30 minutes and whatever is there is the content... Then I wrote some poetry which to me epitomised the plight of refugees the world over and also spoke about how the world was developing... |
|
In Re Ansel Adams 2008 90 seconds
In 2008 I took myself to Yosemite Valley to try to interrogate the idea that moving image may be able to match still image photographic works (even though photographically it had less resolution) - such as Ansel Adams famous view of the Yosemite Valley from Tunnel View. I hired a Red Camera from San Francisco to be delivered on site by a camera assistant Jeremy Wong and together we pored over the manual to work out how to set the camera up. Id hired an $80,000 24mm to 297mm Angénieux lens as I'd planned to zoom in 6 miles or so and hold the shot of the bridal veil Falls for 45 seconds - the point being that on my return to London I'd then zoom in to the pixels fade up the still shot and then slowly zoom out digitally until I'd met the point where - back in time in Yosemite, I'd then slowly optically zoom out to finally reveal the Ansel Adams Landscape at the end of the zoom - at which time I'd fade out the colour to black and white. |
|
U238 1976 2 minutes
This is for fun: Circa 1976 we had a group called Vida and Anthony Cooper suggested we took our band called The Vomettes (we were young, it was a gesture) and Antony had written a song concerning Plutonium called U238. Tony sings, Oswaldo the politcal refugee from Chile backing vocals and I was on guitar - Tony had already started experimenting with Super 8, video had just arrived and I had started editing - we both recorded the performance as it was shot and suddenly we had the ability to put all of this together: So we did. In America this might have been an 'art gesture' in the sober UK it was mucking about. However, the politics are prescient of what is happening 48 years later... |
|