MLitt Fine Art Practice School of Fine Art
Esmé Haddrill Selman
How do you understand and traverse the space between yourself and the world each day?
Esmé Haddrill Selman is an artist filmmaker working with the moving image as the central point of her practice. Her work largely explores how it feels to be alive, to move through the world and encounter it in our bodies, through film. She often works with celluloid film, the process of working with the physical film becoming an important dimension to the work. She is interested in how the acts of filmmaking and watching can both bring us closer to the world and to other people, thinking of making films as an embodied and emotional practice.
Her practice has recently been investigating how film can capture the way we come into contact with the world, specifically through the space between ourselves, others, and the objects that shift around us. This has led to different explorations of tension, between the near and far, the horizontal and vertical, text and image, thinking of tension and closeness as sensations which can be captured on film and crafted through editing.
Her work has also begun to approach sculpture from a filmic perspective, working with materials which interact with light to expand the projected image. This is alongside new experiments with interactive forms of film installation, attempting to open up the experience of film and allow for dialogue between the analogue and digital.
This body of work, the blinking at the start of the day, brings together these experiments in one installation. As is the name of the show, all of the text found in the work was taken from The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, see the handout in the space for more.
come closer
supersonic sensor + arduino uno, super 8 transfer to digital
As the body moves closer and further away from the screen, the position of the subject on screen also changes with it. As you move towards something, it moves away from you. There is often frustration in the space between us, desires of closeness going unmet.
ordinary touch
clear super 8 film leader, screen printing ink
Using excerpts from The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, text painted horizontally across super 8 leader translates writing into vertical flickerings of film as it moves through the projector. An exercise in considering the different affective quality words take on when watched versus read. How do we receive language through different channels?
The movement of the text becomes a sensation like receiving someone’s voice. The shape of a letter becomes a window into the photographic image.
disorientation held promise
scenes of pleasure floated by
one direct hit after another
the blinking at the start of the day
and there it is, a thing that will be repeated
a simple relief like pushing a restart button
unforeseen touch and no flinching
so we look for points of precision where something is happening
how people try to bring things to an end like the day
what’s an extraordinary or ordinary touch
the constant straightening up
the need to retreat
the little jokes that mark social contact
the resentments slowly accruing
all the extensions of ways of being touched
what it feels like to be carried along by something on the move
the voicing
so many mouths opening and closing
we are separate people trying to stay in sync
if you let a piece go without completion
then maybe you find a way to reattach to life
not knowing until later what will have been easy and what will have been hard
a shift in direction is a friction even if there’s no disagreement
the blinking at the start of the day
colour super 8 transfer to digital, super 8 leader direct animation transfer to digital
Everyday we brush against the world in ways we both desire and don’t. How does it feel to be close to the world? How does it feel to be close to a film? How does a close-up feel different to watch than a wide shot?
The main film work in this installation brings together different methods of working with analogue film in a reflection on the space between us and the world beyond ourselves, and the affective nature of the moving image. Placing subjects at different distances, including so close to the lens that they can only appear out of focus, this work intends to capture how it feels to be close to other people, objects, the world, considering how film can record that feeling and the tensions it brings. The soft focus of the subjects on screen signifies their closeness to the camera, and therefore intimacy with the person behind the camera.
Layered over this footage is another work which can be found in the space, ordinary touch, an experiment in translating text to the moving image. Combining the two types of super 8 acts as an exercise in exploring the tension between the affective qualities of text and the moving image respectively.
The scale of the installation situates the viewer in the small space between the camera and the subject, thinking about the distance between the body and the film, and how this changes the experience of watching film.
found
colour negative standard 8mm transfer to digital
A compilation of moments from reels of standard 8mm films purchased on eBay, edited digitally to avoid altering the original films. The disintegration of the film, which dates back to the 60s, echoes the fragility of the medium, the blemishes and wrinkles of the film appearing like a skin.
An out of focus grin, a silver bow, a hand swatting the camera away. The distance between the camera and the subjects in front of it, their proximity, becomes a reflection of their emotional closeness with the person behind the camera; if I can film this close to you, we must share some kind of intimacy.
