Caption: Kerfissien-Amlodipine. (2020), photo: Nicky Hamlyn.
Chlorophilia : Artists : Nicky Hamlyn
Caption: Kerfissien-Amlodipine. (2020), photo: Nicky Hamlyn.
About the artwork
Kerfissien-Amlodipine is generated from a short clip shot with a phone on a beach near Kerfissien, a town on the Channel coast of Finisterre, Brittany. Like a number of my video works, it explores optical effects, ruptures and incongruities in the visual field generated by looping very short sections of footage shot at 25fps. The smallest number of frames to make a loop is three, but here some of the loops are composed from four consecutive frames.
Chlorophyll is the pigment in green plants that absorbs light in the process of Photosynthesis, whereby light is converted into energy that sustains the plant's life. In this short video that process is reversed: energy generates light, which is the subject of the work. Two kinds of energy generators are visible, the reflecting waves of sea water running over rippled sand as the tide goes out on a beach in Finisterre, and kinetic-optical energy, generated by the animation of single frames of image in rapid succession. In both cases, scintillation is figured in the flashes and bursts of points and lines of light.
About the artist
Nicky Hamlyn is a filmmaker who has made over seventy single 16mm films, videos, multi-projector performances and installation works since 1974. He is Professor of Experimental Film at University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury and a tutor at the RCA, London. He has published a book, Film Art Phenomena (BFI, 2003) and many essays on experimental and artists' film and co-edited books on the Austrian filmmaker Kurt Kren (Intellect, 2016) and: Experimental and Expanded Animation (Palgrave, 2019).
Blog: www.nickyhamlyn.com