This fixed-frame work depicts a landscaped garden whose stillness is broken only by the wind that plays across it. In the film projection that depicts a landscaped garden whose stillness is broken by the wind that plays across it. The piece, which is named after the estate where it was shot, creates and then undoes the illusion of the wind as a natural phenomenon.  The piece reflects on the medium of film itself, the wind becoming an image of time playing across the photographic stillness of the garden.

Like other earlier film and video works ‘Model 280’, ‘Yard’ and ‘Yard’ this new work questions the necessity for viewers to suspend their disbelief in order to become involved in the psychologically and dramatically charged qualities of its subject. In Nettlecombe  the wind was achieved through an orchestrated performance of wind machines and ropes in which the trees and bushes in the garden are animated like puppets within a constructed set. In creating and then gradually undoing the illusion of the wind as a natural phenomenon “Nettlecombe’ shares common ground with the aims of Structural film makers of the 1970’s.  Here the image of wind is treated as an image of time itself playing across a landscape that seems so untouched by modernity.     

Exhibitions / screenings of the film include:

Currently featuring in online exhibition Landscape & the Moving Images curated by Cate Elwes for LUX (until February 2024) https://lux.org.uk/event/landscape-and-the-moving-image/ Festival Internacional de Videoarte Cultivamos Cultura August 2019 CCA LUX Glasgow 2013                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Exhibitions / screenings continued
Human Made Things, with Andy Holden 2012 Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth (Exhibition) London Open, Whitechapel Gallery June - October 2012 (Exhibition) On the Nature of Things 15 October - 31 December 2011 Kamloops Art Gallery (Exhibition) Re-calling the shots December 2010 CCA Tyneside (Screening) Now You See It 11 Nov - 13 Dec 2009 Cafe Gallery Projects, Southwark Park (Exhibition) Figuring Landscapes 2008- 2010 to Circa, Newcastle, FACT, Liverpool, Tate Modern, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Vivid, Birmingham, Showroom, Sheffield, Hull International Film Festival, Site Festival, Stroud Valley, Cinecity, Brighton Film Festival, Mermaid Centre, County Wicklow, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Melbourne Cinematech. (Screenings & Exhibitions) Sarah Dobai Films & Photographs Galerie Zurcher, Paris October - December 2008 (Exhibition)

Articles & Essays
Review of Human Made Things LINK From Figuring Landscape and Landscape and the Moving Image by Cate Elwes LINK

FUNDING Film London