Oil Dancer
2019 — Three-channel video installation
AVAILABLE FOR EXHIBITION
This work is available for exhibition, screening and installation. For curatorial enquiries, exhibition proposals or further technical information, please get in touch.
Oil Dancer is a three-channel video installation that transforms the movement of a dancer into a layered, suspended image.
Rather than presenting movement as a continuous sequence, the work fragments the body across time. Individual frames are stretched, repeated and combined, allowing several moments of a single movement to exist simultaneously.
The result sits between video, photography and painting: the image continues to move, but the movement has been slowed, accumulated and made visible.
The work asks what happens when time is no longer experienced as a sequence, but as a material that can be shaped, layered and held.
The Beginning
Oil Dancer marks the beginning of my current body of work.
The work developed from an exploration of how the moving image could be used to make time visible. Working with the movement of a dancer, I began to treat individual video frames not simply as moments within a sequence, but as material that could be isolated, manipulated and recombined.
This shifted the role of video within my practice. Instead of using the medium primarily to record movement, I began using it to examine what exists within movement: the fragments, repetitions and transitional moments that are normally lost as an action unfolds.
The body became a way into this investigation. By separating a movement into multiple temporal positions, the dancer could appear simultaneously within the same space, creating an image that was both recognisable and unfamiliar.
This process established a method that continues through the work that followed.
Time as Material
A recorded movement normally moves in one direction: beginning, continuation, end.
In Oil Dancer, that sequence is interrupted.
The individual frames of the performance become independent elements that can be returned to, repeated and placed beside one another. Moments that would normally exist fractions of a second apart can occupy the same visual field.
The dancer is therefore not represented at one particular point in time. The body becomes distributed across time.
This creates an image that cannot be understood entirely as a photograph, because it retains movement, or entirely as video, because movement has been made spatial.
Time becomes something closer to a sculptural material: something that can be stretched, compressed, layered and composed.
The work is concerned with this space between moments—the point at which movement becomes image and an image begins to retain the memory of movement.
The Body
The dancer provides the starting point for the work, but the finished image is less concerned with representing a particular body than with what happens to the body when it is subjected to time.
A gesture becomes a series of traces.
A single body becomes multiple bodies.
A continuous action becomes an accumulation of moments.
The figure begins to move away from conventional representation and towards something more ambiguous: part body, part image, part record of an action that has already happened.
The resulting forms are recognisable enough to suggest movement, but unstable enough to prevent the viewer from fixing the image to a single moment.
Process
The work began with recorded movement and developed through the manipulation of individual frames.
Rather than treating the footage as a finished sequence, I worked back through the material, isolating moments and recomposing them into new visual relationships.
Frames could be extended, repeated, layered or displaced from their original position in the sequence. The resulting images were then considered in relation to duration, rhythm and the physical movement of the body.
The process became a form of editing, but also a form of composition: a way of constructing an image from fragments of time.
Oil Dancer – 360º documentation
Artist Archive:
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