Biography
Tolmie MacRae is an Australian video artist and senior creative production professional based in Cologne, Germany.
His artistic practice explores time, movement, digital image-making and the materiality of video through video installation, moving image and digital prints.
His work examines time, perception and the transformation of movement into image. His practice has developed through a sustained engagement with video as both a recording medium and a material that can be manipulated, fragmented and reconstructed.
His earlier practice developed through live visual performance, digital media and moving-image installation, with work presented internationally across exhibition, performance and digital-art contexts.
His exhibition history includes ISEA, the Sydney Opera House, MONA, Shedhalle Tübingen, Artrooms Fair London, Arte Laguna Prize and the Athens Digital Arts Festival, among others. He studied in Australia before developing his practice internationally and is currently based in Cologne, Germany.
His work continues to investigate the relationship between the moving body, the individual frame and the experience of time, exploring how images can hold multiple moments simultaneously.
Current Practice
I explore time as a sculptural material, transforming moving bodies into layered abstractions that exist somewhere between photography, painting and video.
My current practice is concerned with what happens when movement is taken apart and reassembled. Rather than treating video simply as a means of recording motion, I use the individual frame as a material in itself—stretching, repeating, layering and recomposing moments to reveal forms of movement and perception that are ordinarily hidden within continuous time.
The work often begins with the human body, but the body gradually becomes something less fixed: fragmented, multiplied, suspended or transformed. A movement can occupy several moments simultaneously; a single gesture can become a field, a trace or an accumulation of bodies.
This approach developed through Oil Dancer (2019), which marked the beginning of my current body of work and established many of the questions that continue through subsequent works including Multiplicity, Above & Below and Entheogens. The Artist Archive traces this development through individual works, their origins, processes and the ideas that have shaped them.
I am interested in creating spaces in which time behaves differently—where the viewer can slow down, become immersed and encounter movement without being required to follow a conventional narrative.
Artist Statement
My practice explores the relationship between time, perception and the multiplicity of experience through video, moving image and installation.
I am interested in the space between what we see and what we experience: the moments that pass too quickly to register, the fragments that remain after an event has ended, and the possibility that a single moment can contain multiple versions of itself.
Video provides a particular way of working with this uncertainty. By breaking continuous movement into frames and manipulating their sequence, duration and repetition, I can treat time as something physical and malleable. A body can be stretched across a moment, repeated within itself, or made to occupy several temporal positions at once. What begins as movement can become an image; what appears to be a still image can retain the sensation of movement.
This process is not primarily about distortion. It is about possibility.
My work is informed by an interest in multiplicity, transcendence and immanence, and in the ways individual experience can exist simultaneously as something embodied and something beyond the immediate physical world. These ideas are not intended to prescribe a particular interpretation of the work, but to create conditions in which perception can remain open.
I am interested in generous, non-demanding spaces: works that allow viewers to spend time with an image, to enter and leave it, and to experience the passage of time differently. The work asks what might become visible when we give ourselves permission to look beyond the immediate moment.