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Sarah Pucill�s films and photographs explore the mirroring and merging we seek in the Other; a sense of self which is transformative and fluid. Her work is concerned with the idea that as subjects we are not separate where surfaces of inside and outside, animate and inanimate draw together. Focusing on the materiality of film and the body, her films probe unsettling worlds of mirror and surface.
Distributors: Canyon Cinema, CFMDC, NY Filmmakers' Coop, BFI, LUX and Light Cone. For upcoming screenings and events see: http://www.sarahpucill.co.uk/news.php
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Blind Light 2007, stills (16mm, 20min)
Blind Light (16mm, 20min; col, sound). From within the space of her London studio the artist produces images by controlling the light she allows into the frame. She lifts the blinds or pulls them shut, applies filters to the lens or removes them, opens wide the aperture or closes it. Each performance, each action threatens the image as it shifts in and out of 'proper' exposure until it disappears completely. Focusing either on the window or the sky, the artist narrates her camera operation whilst also describing what she sees, intermixing receptive or projective vision. 'I can't look', she says, 'the clouds are coming in', 'there's been no rain for weeks', 'the eye burns, swells, looses focus and disappears in a stream'. Between aperture, eyeball, sun and moon, source and projection swap place. The film journeys from the grounded reality of the here and now - audibly represented through footsteps, birds and traffic, to a psychical space expressed through voice and abstraction.
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Fall In Frame (16mm, 18min), Pucill�s latest production, is her tenth film for gallery and cinema. It opens with the image of a young woman looking at herself and her camera in the mirror, each revealed as she unwraps a sheet to uncover the lens. She sets up the filming space by staging both set and camera and manipulates the light by handling the blind, each action weighted with its sound. In this film the materiality of the filmmaking process is explored within a constrained performance that blurs the split between the physical and consciousness. The elastic role of the white cloth that wraps the body or camera, covers the table, shuts out the light or trails the dress, evokes a white canvass or film screen upon which images or objects are projected, painted or sewn onto. The sheet literally folds between foreground and background, space and object, form and content. The film ends where it starts with the sheet around the camera, shutting out the image.
Untitled 1, Stages of Mourning Series, 2004
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