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Aspect

Emily Richardson

2004 00:08:49 United KingdomColorStereo4:316mm film
Tags:
Nature

Description

In Aspect colour, light and shadow shift across the surface of the forest as the duration of a calendar year is condensed into minutes. Using photographic techniques, such as time lapse and long exposures on single film frames, the film shifts between seeing the trees as trees and the movement of light and shadow as a formal play that abstracts the real environment. Fragments of forest sounds typically unregistered, ants in their anthill, the wind across the forest floor, the crack of a twig, are reconfigured into an audio piece by Benedict Drew that articulates the film (and the forest) in an illusive and ambiguous way.

“Across the surface of the forest, light, colour, shadow shift; rhythmic, kaleidoscopic. Matter and the immaterial in constant counteraction. The screen becomes a painting in animation. Ordinarily, light describes the motif. Here, the forest is almost – almost – occluded as the light that delineates the world becomes autonomous, visible; describes itself as subject. There are some very strange effects: light and shadow grow, die back; bark shimmers; branches tremble, or clouds pass above; trees shiver in the cold, or shake in threatening gesture; sunlight flickers, on and off, like an electric bulb. The portrait lives. These films are not the index of space and objects, but a cinema of time, movement, light; flickering lashes of mesmerised eyes in the click of an aperture.” 
— Mark Edwards; extract from Invisible / Visible in Time Frames, a Stour Valley Arts Publication

About Emily Richardson

Emily Richardson is a filmmaker and researcher examining the trace of human presence on particular landscapes and environments on the cusp of change.

Richardson’s films document sites of power and corporate interest at particular moments in time uncovering layers of narrative embedded in these contested landscapes, whether East London prior to the Olympics, abandoned military architecture of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment of Orford Ness, the oil industry on the Scottish coastline, the contentious expansion of Sizewell nuclear power station, or the exploitation of the Far North.

Richardson’s work sits within a lineage of filmmakers addressing ideas about our relationship to and impact on natural and constructed landscapes and environments through a reflexive observational approach to making work using a cross-disciplinary methodology that includes walking, photography, filmmaking, sound recording, historical and archive research, interviews, books and podcasts.

Richardson's films have been shown in galleries, museums and festivals internationally including Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London, Pompidou Centre, Paris, Barbican Cinema, London; Anthology Film Archives, New York and Venice, Edinburgh, BFI London, Rotterdam and New York Film Festivals.