Chris Welsby

A London park and artist Chris Welsby runs repeatedly into frame and off into the distance; his actions contrast with the more leisurely activities of others passing by. The camera remained stationary at shooting and a hand-clap to synchronise sound at the start of each take is not edited out. The piece has the appearance of a film loop but it becomes clear that it is a series of different takes.

The camera was placed on the flexible branch of a tree in a strong wind. The composition included both stationary and moving trees (a wooded landscape). The relationship of this landscape to the vertical and horizontal plane was maintained as much as possible. The camera ran continuously until all the film was exposed. The world is seen from the point of view of a tree as its branches sway to the rhythm of the wind.

WHITE OUT was recorded and edited one cold morning in February 2021. It’s about how light looks when it’s falling on snow and how snow can make white light visible even in the darkness of winter. I used a recording of white noise to replace the sound of snow falling. I was thinking about what it feels like to look at snow falling.

In the early afternoon a cool breeze raises white caps on the ocean before rushing busily inland. The palm trees respond with broad circular gestures and their lower branches echo this wave-like rhythm, by turns revealing and concealing the cool shade and patches of sunlight below the forest canopy. Light escaping from a perfect blue sky sends sharp shadows flickering from branch to branch as patches of ragged sunlight chase each other back and forth across this delicate web of tropical plant life. Meanwhile, a short distance away, a crocodile is dozing in the hot afternoon sun. She is completely still, but from time to time her heavily armoured eyelids blink open and just as quickly shut. In that instant, the light reflected from the precarious world about us is lost in a tunnel of reptilian darkness stretching from this moment back to the beginning of time.

Strapped high on a moving branch of a palm tree, the camera sways gracefully in the ocean breeze. In the frame we see other waving branches, their delicate leaves like so many tiny green sails, vibrating in response to the force of the wind as it carries water vapour from the ocean to the land. The movement of these branches creates a dynamic counterpoint between tree and camera.

This is not so much a film about a park, or a record of the people passing through the park. Here the camera is not a passive observer, nor is it used as a surveillance device. Rather, the camera in Park Film, like the passers by who trigger its shutter, is an active participant in the interaction between a park and the city which surrounds it.

My intention was to make a video in ironic celebration of the increasingly inexplicable human obsession with the automobile, while simultaneously paying tribute to the transformative power of nature. Set in the temperate rain forest of North America’s Pacific West Coast the video, may perhaps, remind us that it was hereabouts that the V8 Mercury was once the ambassador of the Ford Motor Corporation, the family vehicle of choice, and an essential player in the ritual of courtship and romantic love.

Two cameras mounted on tripods with wind vane attachments were positioned about 50 feet apart along an axis of 45 degrees to the direction of the wind. Both cameras were free to pan through 360 degrees in the horizontal plane. There are three continuous 100 foot takes for each screen. The movements of the two cameras, which were filming simultaneously, were controlled by the wind strength and direction.

The film was shot in one continuous 400 foot take. The camera looks through the blades of the windmill, recording either what is behind or in front of the windmill blades. A rhythm determined by the speed and direction of the wind.

The location is a small bay in Wales, this bay faces due north over the Irish sea. It has high ground to the east and west and low ground to the south. At its mouth it measures about a quarter of a mile from one side to the other. From the mouth to the beach, at the southernmost point, it measures half of a mile. The distance between the high and low tide mark on the beach is about 100 yards during spring tide. The tripod was placed at an angle of 60 degrees to the horizontal plane midway between the two sides of the bay and at the waters edge. The camera panned through 360 degrees stopping every 45 degrees to take a predetermined number of frames. The shooting speed was one frame per second.

Windmill II is one of a series of films (Wind Vane, Anemometer, Tree, Park, Estuary etc.) which uses an element present within the frame as a feedback device to control an aspect of the recording process. In this case it is the wind moving the leaves on the trees within the frame which also causes the windmill to rotate like a secondary shutter in front of the camera. This rotation of the mirrored windmill blades causes the image on the screen to alternate between the space in front of the camera, seen intermittently through the blades, and the space behind the camera, reflected in the blades. When the windmill reaches a particular speed, a third space is also created as the deep space of the picture plane fragments and becomes a two dimensional abstract surface of colour and light.

The notion of a line which divides the land from the sea is a notion of convenience which is only valid in certain circumstances. If there is a line at all, it only exists for a second or so, and is never repeated again. This film was shot on this imaginary line, but the leading or trailing edge of the wave is never represented. The shore line is replaced by a frame line which divides each one-second "take" from its neighbour. The frame is either filled with water or littered with stones and sand exposed after the wave has receded. The image on the screen, the organic rhythm of the waves, is not destroyed by the violence of the structures imposed upon it. Nature emerges uninhibited, revealing yet further complexities of shape and form. The illusory shore line remains invisible, trapped on celluloid, hidden by the mechanics of the projector, and de-materialised by the illusion of cinematographic movement.

As the harsh reality of Climate Change takes hold in the public imagination, the idea of nature as landscape becomes increasingly inappropriate. Landscapeis more than something to be admired in our leisure time or an artifact to be hung on an art gallery wall. It is, as everyone is surely aware, the planet we live on and includes all biological life. The deepening uncertainty surrounding humanities future now makes it impossible to contemplate the beauty of this world without grieving for all that we have lost. This loss of innocence is accompanied by an ever- present foreboding for that which the future holds. Casting Light invites the viewer to take some time to contemplate their own relationship to the moving image and to the subtle intricacies of light falling on water.

The overall feel of Drift is sombre and mysterious; a study of winter light falling on the surface of water, metal and cloud. The dominant colour is grey; grey infused with a multitude of ocean blues and greens. There is little land in this film and very few landmarks from which to navigate from one space to the next. The picture plane is in continuous motion like the ocean which, on the surface at least, is the subject of Drift.

The film is a continuous, "real time" tracking shot of a stream bed. The length of the track was ten yards. The camera was suspended in a motorized carriage running on steel cables three feet above the water surface. The camera pointed vertically downwards recording the contours of the stream bed and the flow of water along its course. The sound of the water was recorded synchronously from the moving carriage.

In Momentum the fallibility of human aspiration and the comparatively certainty of concrete, are both seen to be parts of a constantly changing river of colour and light. The monumental solidity of the concrete ruins are thus seen to be as unstable and as tenuous as both the lives of those who built them or those who have since inscribed their identity on the crumbling walls.Although we may find consolation in the idea that the world around us is predominantly stable with only an occasional disruption to the fabric of our personal realities, it is probably more realistic to understand, as Heraclitus did more than a thousand years ago, that pockets of stability are in fact, unusual and temporary and that the only constant is continuous change.

Seven Days invites the viewer to contemplate the complex relationship between the structures we invent in order to observe the natural world and the structure we perceive as a result of those observations. The resulting sequences of images suggest a relationship between technology and nature based on principles other than exploitation and domination.

An idyllic river flows through a forest, flashes of light and colour threaten to erase the image, bursts of short wave radio and static invade the tranquillity of the natural sound. The camera searches amongst the craggy rocks and ruined buildings of a bleak and windswept snowscape, a Geiger counter chatters ominously in the background. The sky is overcast at first but gradually clears to reveal a sky of unnatural cobalt blue.

The location for this film is a small London park which is situated close to the busy centre of the city. The camera faces south east across the park, in the foreground there is an expanse of grass surrounded by walkways and luxurious trees. In the middle distance is a junction of the busy Euston road, trucks busses and commuter traffic surge past halting only for the traffic lights.

Shot in the Sonora desert, Mexico in March 2017 "Desert Spring" is a joyful little dance between camera (autofocus), the wind and some flowering foliage I found high on the shady side of a mountain. There is hope in this movie ; hope prompted in part by the surprize of finding such a delicate beauty in the midst of such harsh climatic conditions. The movie is intimate in it's close up detail of flowers and leaves and this fragile beauty is made the more poignant by the sound mix which, foregrounds the vast and hostile expanses of the burning desert winds.