Mean Time (2020)

9-minute film, with sound, made during a residency with Collective Gallery, Edinburgh during the global pandemic.

The film invokes a consideration of photography as a product of a way of looking at and thinking about, the world prefigured on separating or shuttering it. The film includes a quote by the theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay which calls for a critical unlearning of photography and its histories. The quote is cut up, and spaced out, to slow down the act of reading so that words become fixed to the image behind them forcing a new reading of both.

‘Mean Time’ is also the calculation of solar time, sometimes referred to as clock time. It is used as the work’s title in relation to the experience of, or feeling about, a certain period of time as being troubled or unjust.

Mean Time is distributed by The Film-makers Co-op, NYC

Movable Type; Under Erasure (2016)

13 minute film with sound. Made in collaboration with the theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

The work was largely filmed at ‘Writing-on-Stone’ / Áísínai’pi in the language of the Blackfoot people in present day Alberta, Canada on the Northern edge of the semi-arid Great Plains of North America, on the border between Canada and the United States of America. The film features an original monologue which was written and voiced by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and various forms of communication technology, cultural re-enactment sites and a specific petroglyph of a car which existed as ‘graffiti’ attributed to European settlers until a photograph with the caption 'Piegan elder, Bird Rattle, carving the automobile petroglyph at Writing-On-Stone on September 14th, 1924' was discovered in 1998 and its provenance confirmed, thus elevating the carving from a work of vandalism to a historically significant image.

Movable Type; Under Erasure has been shown at the Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University, Cample Line Gallery, Dumfriesshire and The Showroom , London.

Development (2000 - 2015)

Development is a SD video filmed in, and on the way to the tourist district of Kuta, Bali in 2000 and edited in 2015.

Two years after this footage was filmed the Sari nightclub was the site of a major bombing attack that killed over 200 people and is thought to have been carried out in retaliation to Western government’s 'war on terror' campaign. The video includes Balinese ritualistic dance dramas, Legong dancing (characterised by complex finger movements, footwork, and expressive facial expressions), and dances constructed specifically for tourist audiences. Consisting of hand-held shots, diegetic sound, and text by the artist segments of the video are filmed in 'night-vision'

Development is distributed by The Film-makers Co-op, NYC

Fib (2013)

Digital film with sound. 22 min 30 sec

Filmed in Fife, Scotland. Commissioned by LUX Moving Image & Collective, Edinburgh

Writing Culture (2013)

Video with sound. 1 min 49 sec.

A video work which considers the privilege afforded to the ‘word’ (written or spoken) over that of the image. The title contextualises the video regarding anthropology’s self-reflective critique of ethnographic texts as the primary means to record the results of fieldwork and the inherent problems of ‘writing’ an 'other’s ‘culture’. It also directly references the influential book 'Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography' (1986) by James Clifford & George Marcus, which is primarily charged with signalling the so-called 'crisis of representation'.

Anthropology or the difference between footprints and footsteps (2010)

SD video with sound. 4 min 20 sec.

Filmed on location at Robert Smithson’s 'Broken Circle, Spiral Hill' in Emmen, The Netherlands and including selected scenes from Slava Tsukermans film ‘Liquid Sky' (1982).

Anthropology or the difference between footprints and footsteps has been screened in various events including 'An Endless Theatre; the convergence of contemporary art and anthropology in observational cinema' University of Edinburgh and in the Artists Moving Image Festival at Tramway, Glasgow

The Real Thing (1998)

SD video with sound. 14 min.

This work explores theoretical and physical forms of liminality, considering the gaze of both the surgeon and the camera as a “penetrating gaze” (Paul Virilio, 1984), intent on exposing and going beyond a surface. Filmed at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in collaboration with the cardiac surgery team and patient consent.

Mystics After Modernism (2012)

SD video with sound. 6 min 5 sec.

The work was filmed at the Sighthill Stone Circle (built in 1979) in North Glasgow which was the first astronomically aligned stone circle to be built in Great Britain for over 3,000 years. Four large residential tower blocks were adjacent to the site of stone circle. The 2 towers forming Fountainwell were demolished a few years before the film was made, and the Pinkston flats were demolished a few year after.

Mystics after Modernism has been screened at Tramway, Glasgow and in the LUX Salon event 'Like slow breathing, it seemed to emanate from inside the walls' Curated by Erik Martinson