series
a set of things differing progressively: the sum where each term of a sequence is added to the previous one
[L. series - serere, sertum, to join]
New Contemporaries 98, Tea Factory Liverpool, Camden Arts Centre London, Hatton Gallery Newcastle. Selectors: Phyllida Barlow, Eddie Berg, Christine Hohenbuchler, Adrian Searle.
Disorders, (produced by Beaconsfield) St Thomas' Hospital, London — series shown alongside Sleep Walkers in a hospital corridor.
The story of an incident seen by my sister who went to (the former) Yugoslavia just before the last war started was the initial motive for making the work. Visiting the village where our father was born and grew up, she had seen a flock of white geese in the middle of the road. A speeding truck appeared, driving straight through the flock without stopping, leaving some dead, dying, and bloodied at the scene. What she told me stayed with me, I could not forget it. I wanted to re-create the moment just before the devastation, and to hold time still - to create a pause.
A flock of geese fill the image completely and walk slowly across the frame in one direction, then gradually the whole flock turn and walk in the opposite direction and turn again. The film runs continuously as a 4 minute loop. The 180 'loop of film is contained in a glass case allowing the film to fall into folds, creating a moving, looping pattern.
The materiality of the film is brought into play — the long loop, and the constantly changing, repeating pattern visible in the glass case, echoing the undulating pattern and movement of the geese in the projection.
Filmed on a geese farm in Kent using a Bolex camera with 16mm B&W film. The geese started to circle me as I filmed. Only a small portion of the original film was used and processed again, enlarging the centre section of each frame emphasising the grains in the film that make up the image, then repeating frames to slow it down.
Artist Douglas Gordon has described the use of slow motion as 'the unconscious of film'.
When elements of our day to day experiences are translated into dreams this material is also manipulated and the original sometimes lost completely, often what is remembered seems trivial, insignificant or obscure, and as one viewer remarked, 'it's just geese'.
“…movement is distinct from space covered. Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering. The space covered is divisible... infinitely divisible... movement is indivisible or cannot be divided without changing qualitatively each time it is divided.”