Turning the camera on myself
Multiplicity began during a particularly productive period in my practice. I had been experimenting with ways of manipulating moving image so that video could describe time without necessarily behaving like a conventional sequence.
I was becoming interested in making works that had no clear beginning, middle or end. Rather than leading the viewer from one moment to another, the image could exist in a continual state of transformation: movement without a destination, time without progression.
After Oil Dancer, Above and Below and the other experiments that came out of this period, I began to wonder what else this developing visual language could do.
If painters make still lifes, landscapes and portraits as different ways of looking, perhaps I could do something similar with moving image.
I decided to make a portrait.
More specifically, for the first time in my artistic practice, I turned the camera on myself.
Three figures, one self
The central figure in Multiplicity is me. On either side are two close collaborators who had been part of my creative life for many years.
At first, the work was an exercise in technique. I experimented with how the camera could move, how the image could be manipulated and which movements produced something that felt visually convincing. I worked through these possibilities until I found a process that I could deconstruct, understand and recreate.
But once the technique was established, the more interesting question became: what am I actually doing with it?
The manipulation was no longer simply a visual effect. It offered a way of thinking about the people within the image.
The three figures do not remain separate. They move through one another. Faces appear, disappear and reform. One identity becomes another before either has fully resolved. The image continually folds back into itself.
The portrait therefore never settles into a portrait.
A self that will not stay still
This led me back to an idea I had encountered through Jean-Paul Sartre: the fluidity of the self.
I had been thinking about identity not as something singular and stable, but as something continually produced and revised through experience and existence. We understand ourselves as one person, yet that sense of self is constantly changing. We carry different versions of ourselves through different relationships, environments and moments.
Video seemed particularly suited to exploring this.
A photograph can hold a person in a single moment. Multiplicity instead allows the person to become ever changing, evolving and shifting.
The three heads continually pass through themselves, producing a portrait that is never quite complete. There are moments where one face seems to emerge clearly, only for it to dissolve into another movement. The work exists in the space between these recognisable forms.
There is no final image of the self.
The portrait as process
The looping structure became important here.
Because the work has no conventional beginning or ending, the transformation does not resolve. It simply continues. Once the sequence reaches its apparent conclusion, it returns to its beginning, making the distinction between the two meaningless.
This creates a kind of continual present.
The figures are always becoming something else, but they are never arriving anywhere.
That became a way of thinking about identity itself: not as a fixed construction that can ultimately be revealed, but as something that is continually evolving.
The self is not necessarily one thing hidden underneath everything else.
It may be the movement between things.
From technique to question
In this sense, Multiplicity marked an important development in my practice.
The techniques I had been developing through earlier works were no longer simply methods for transforming an image. They had become my visual language that could be applied to different subjects and used to ask different questions.
This was one of the first times I consciously tested that idea.
I had developed a way of manipulating video to make movement behave differently — to interrupt direction, destabilise form and create images that seemed to exist outside ordinary progression.
With Multiplicity, I applied that language to the human figure.
The result was not an attempt to distort a portrait for its own sake. It was an attempt to use distortion to ask what a portrait might represent if identity itself were understood as fluid, unstable and ever changing.
Three people become one image.
One person becomes many.
The portrait becomes a process rather than an object.
Artist Archive
004
Multiplicity
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Published
November 2026