Screaming Hole
- 2022A kaleidoscopic tunnel channels other worldly light and dark to the screen, gusted screams of air escape from gaps in the black, computerised arteries.
Screaming hole opens with muted blue rings coming in and out of focus, establishing the screen as akin to a retina. We look out of the hole or into a microscope, taking in the blue light at the end of the tunnel.
The film cuts to a deep blue, pulsating jelly-like creature, or maybe a muscle, that pushes to one side revealing a black cavity muting the rich blue colours.
Screaming winds break out from the void, a Geiger counter-like sound is intermittently heard through the screams, an aural equivalent of radiation or light emerging from the hole.
The void grows and shrinks, distorting the reflections on the outer rings until the blue light is completely saturated and imagery returns to a hole-less glow.
Kitchen Sink
- 2022Debris spins around a grey watery sky while winds move the hair atop hills, an alien fragment of light tied in weeds lurks beneath watching, breathing.
We see a grey saturated landscape and aqueous mercury sky, behind
a hilltop of undulating grass sifting through particles of dirt and dust as they
pass. Further away from the stormy exterior and down amongst the flowing hairs,
we breathe in and out, seduced by the passive movement of the wind animated
reeds. A sound as if we held our ear to a cavernous shell is constant.
Then cut to the submerged remains of a glowing pebble or a hidden window in the dark. Long sprawling roots reach out towards the surface from the light of the lone seed.
Further we delve toward the origin. The fragment seems to be strangled by the tendrils rather than their source of life. Just another piece of debris caught between the follicles of the Hill.
Cut back out to the full hill being battered by a gale, back to where we started.
Then cut to the submerged remains of a glowing pebble or a hidden window in the dark. Long sprawling roots reach out towards the surface from the light of the lone seed.
Further we delve toward the origin. The fragment seems to be strangled by the tendrils rather than their source of life. Just another piece of debris caught between the follicles of the Hill.
Cut back out to the full hill being battered by a gale, back to where we started.
Untitled
- 2022A tranquil, seemingly well-formed ’Martian’ pile of sand is blown in the wind as an organism eats away matter from beneath, pulling down from the centre of the hill into a well.
Untitled opens
in black
& white, a
flat
layer of sand fills the screen,
a bump in the sand lined with shadows
darts
across. The creature moving underneath
glides around and off screen,
pushing up like a baby in the womb,
shifting under the skin. Accompanied with
the deep distorted sound
of
wind
battering
a
paper wall. An ominous
ringing chimes in and sits
in waiting, the creature
starts
circling the same area.
Cut to an aerial shot of a sand pile. The sound of grains crunching fades in, and some grains of sand fall down the hill intermittently. The ringing stops. The view shifts to a profile view of the sand just piled in the centre lacking the skin texture and bodily shape. The sound of strong wind picks up and more grains fall away.
Back to the aerial position the sand is a darker orange hue; scratching sounds echo from beneath and the bump in the centre wobbles, the foetus is poking up beneath the sand, testing. The hill starts to churn and grains cave into a hole in the centre.
The sand is being grabbed from beneath and pulled down to a single point, the hill pulses up and down becoming more of a stretched connected layer than disconnected pile.
Pulling stronger this time to tear a hole in the layer of sand, but to no avail and the sand is left to rest, lifeless once more.
Cut to an aerial shot of a sand pile. The sound of grains crunching fades in, and some grains of sand fall down the hill intermittently. The ringing stops. The view shifts to a profile view of the sand just piled in the centre lacking the skin texture and bodily shape. The sound of strong wind picks up and more grains fall away.
Back to the aerial position the sand is a darker orange hue; scratching sounds echo from beneath and the bump in the centre wobbles, the foetus is poking up beneath the sand, testing. The hill starts to churn and grains cave into a hole in the centre.
The sand is being grabbed from beneath and pulled down to a single point, the hill pulses up and down becoming more of a stretched connected layer than disconnected pile.
Pulling stronger this time to tear a hole in the layer of sand, but to no avail and the sand is left to rest, lifeless once more.
Oculus
- 2021An aperture germinates to an embryonic, alien light. It pulses from inside your eye, growing and stretching, understanding light and translating darkness.
My film Oculus visually ties you to the optic nerve, this umbilical cord, you are forced to feel and hear the distorted outer world solely through a tunnel of light. The sound, an aqueous submerged barrier, has a bassy vibrational frequency.
The camera’s perspective shifts to the outer, warm, glowing membrane, morphing within a black void. The optic cord stretches out and an X-ray-like cornea and lens become visible.
The eye closes and the after-image of bright light is left behind, marked on the screen’s retina. The sound fades outside, the soft blowing of wind on grass. Back into view, the alien orb is being pulled apart, severed from the comforting light before plunging into darkness.
Origo
- 2019Thick smoke rolls out toward the viewer from between holes and canyons in expansive grey rock. Strong winds blow between the forms while they stretch and creak like a calving glacier.
We traverse the rocks shot by shot getting further away from the first until we encounter a vision of the “Grotto”. This marks my obsessive return to an image that struck me from a single shot in Tacita Dean’s Antigone (an experimental 35mm film shown as two simultaneous projections) - a shot introducing me to the Grotto geyser in Yellowstone National Park. The sinuous aperture forms created from erupting over ancient tree trunks.
Now, from its dormant state we cut to a lone white particle in a vast blackness of space, outside the perception of reality. A sci-fi ringing noise emanates from it, mist swirling into it, sucked in by its gravity.
Something changes. Back to the canyons of stone, the ringing sound picks up and smoke is reeled back in between the rocks until drawn into silence. A loud bang echoes back religiously three times and the smoke starts rolling back out.
This time just the sound of soft wind is heard as the smoke travels back through all the bumps and channels in the stone towards us.