Nicky Hamlyn

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

The film is composed of receding planes in a landscape: a back garden and the houses beyond. The wooden lattice fence, visible in the image, marks the border between enclosed and open, private and public space, and forms both a fulcrum for the work and a formal grid by which the shots are framed and organised.

Power Hub is a site-specific time lapse film shot over 24 hours in a disused bus factory in Maidstone, Kent, UK. The film was projected onto the window through which it was shot.

2008 Nicky Hamlyn short experimental work

Ghost stories opens with a sequence of polemical shots: a mysterious shadow, an ambiguous advertisement which has deeper ambiguities unknown even to itself, and a lengthy quotation from Roland Barthes on the nature of autobiography. These opening shots outline the context in which I hope the bulk of the film will be seen: as a critique on so-called visual literacy, which is frequently based on a complacent mis-reading of images, and also as a rejection of film-biography, whose efficacy depends on such visual complacency. The body of the film consists of fragmentary views of the interior of a house, in which desultory activity occasionally takes place, sometimes in front of the camera, sometimes not. A ghost story is told, firewood is sorted.

White Light consists of extreme close-up shots of chrome bath taps and their reflections, including the camera lens, which becomes its own subject, as it closes in on its reflection. This material is mixed with rotoscope animation, created on various surfaces including cel and hand-made paper, where scratched lines are lit from an acute angle to create an image from light and shadow.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

The film is composed of receding planes in a landscape: a back garden and the houses beyond. The wooden lattice fence, visible in the image, marks the border between enclosed and open, private and public space, and forms both a fulcrum for the work and a formal grid by which the shots are framed and organised.

Power Hub is a site-specific time lapse film shot over 24 hours in a disused bus factory in Maidstone, Kent, UK. The film was projected onto the window through which it was shot.

2008 Nicky Hamlyn short experimental work

Ghost stories opens with a sequence of polemical shots: a mysterious shadow, an ambiguous advertisement which has deeper ambiguities unknown even to itself, and a lengthy quotation from Roland Barthes on the nature of autobiography. These opening shots outline the context in which I hope the bulk of the film will be seen: as a critique on so-called visual literacy, which is frequently based on a complacent mis-reading of images, and also as a rejection of film-biography, whose efficacy depends on such visual complacency. The body of the film consists of fragmentary views of the interior of a house, in which desultory activity occasionally takes place, sometimes in front of the camera, sometimes not. A ghost story is told, firewood is sorted.

White Light consists of extreme close-up shots of chrome bath taps and their reflections, including the camera lens, which becomes its own subject, as it closes in on its reflection. This material is mixed with rotoscope animation, created on various surfaces including cel and hand-made paper, where scratched lines are lit from an acute angle to create an image from light and shadow.

This is the second (No. 1 no longer exists) of three films about gas tanks, or "gasometers", as they are called in England. They are located in a large industrial area of ​​North London. Before the discovery of natural gas in the North Sea in the 1960s, they were made from coal. Every town had a gasworks, where gas was processed from coal, and each gasworks included a large storage device, a telescopic metal drum, often contained within an iron frame. Most of them were built between 1860 and 1890. However, my main interest with film is how the supports filter, reflect, refract and break up the light that falls on them. Lattice columns and circular beams generate complex patterns of overlapping shadow movements and light shifts.

Panni is a visually arresting work in its formal structure and visual expression of colors. The subject matter of the film is a row of bed sheets flapping on a clothesline, drying in the wind. The colors punch through the screen as orange sheets flutter against a green backdrop of grass and trees.

A sequence of short films, each based on a dominant colour. Extensive use of time-lapse and frame by frame filming generates scintillating juxtapositions of light phenomena. Filmed in north west Umbria.

WATER WATER revisits the bathroom location of a previous film WHITE LIGHT (1996). It is based around a set of antinomies that operate at various levels, from between frames to between the two halves of the film. The black and white first part is composed of individually filmed frames (animation) which form shots of interlaced contrary motion that nevertheless can be read as sequences of individual frames, and/or in which alternate frames are lit in contrasting ways so as to emulate negative-positive juxtapositions. In the colour second half, dissolves replace cuts, light softens and contrast decreases. Continuity, by way of isomorphic features in the room, replaces the discontinuities of part one.

A study of the TV as the bearer of images and as a scuptural-environmental object. The footage is extracted from an episode of the TV soap Brookside.

Minutiae was made for the BBC 2 programme The Late Show, and was filmed in the same studio. The aim was to make an event-specific work that would contrast with the way the studio appeared on TV.

This is the first (No.1 no longer exists) of three films about Gas Holders, or ‘Gasometers’ as they are known in England. They were located in a large industrial area of North London. Before natural gas was discovered in the North Sea in the 1960s, it was made from coal. Every town had a gas works, where gas was processed from the coal, and every gas works included a large storage device, a telescopic metal drum, often contained within an iron framework. Most of these were constructed between 1860 and 1890. The Gasometers in this film have now been removed and part of the removal process is documented in the film. However, my primary interest with the film is in terms of the way they filter, reflect, refract and break up the light that falls on them.

Polytunnels was filmed in the Upper Tiber Valley, a tobacco growing area in central Italy. Tobacco is still produced there but the EU subsidies end in 2013, after which the appearance of the landscape will change significantly.

A short shot made from a train traveling from south to north through East Croydon station is cut into three-frame sections, each of which is looped for ten seconds. Each loop advances by one one frame at a time. The looping process generates complex artifacts and kinetic illusions in the image.

Penumbra consists of a series of continuous overlapping dissolves on a grid of white bathroom tiles, which are uniformly framed throughout the film.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Silver Street was shot in a single day from my student house in Reading, Berkshire, where I studied Fine Art. Shots were made indoors and outdoors every hour. I adopted a shooting system using consistent framings, interspersed with variations. The film contrasts the interior personal space with the noisy street outside. - Nicky Hamlyn

Set in a particular location, a stretch of ‘white’ – unmetalled – road in Umbria. Structured around ordered and disordered features of the landscape.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Tobacco Shed is one of a series of films based on agricultural buildings, mostly concerned with tobacco production, in northwest Umbria.

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

Series of films recording the dismantling of gas holders in North London, while Henderson's Grain Tower centres on a giant power station chimney that has recently been demolished.

This is the last of three films about gasholders in England. Lattice columns and circular beams generate complex patterns of overlapping shadow movements and light shifts. These are made worse because gasholders often come in pairs, so there is additional interaction between the two, casting shadows on each other over the course of a day.

Honoré Nicolas is a study of a garden in Arles, Provence, shot over a one week period from the same camera position, and edited entirely in-camera. The curtain, which conceals a car-port, dances wildly to the Mistral wind.

A study in contrast, colour and moiré pattern in a public park in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. The film connects with a series of paintings by visual artist, Angela Allen.

Double Fence was shot from the balcony of a B&B in Porto Potenza Picena , on the Adriatic coast near Ancona . The work explores the changes that occur with slight shifts in framings of the same scene, and the dramatic alterations in light, colour , space and movement between early morning and late afternoon. The work is the third in a series that records spontaneously occurring moiré patterns and related phenomena. The multifarious birdsong emanates from a nearby animal and bird sanctuary.

No synopsis available yet.

This film revisits the same location – a room in my house – as an earlier work, Ghost Stories (1983), and is in fact prefaced with a sequence from that film. “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. Architectural, poetic and personal conceptions of space are counterposed and various techniques – multiple dissolves, superimpositions and extreme close-ups – are employed to this end. In revisiting, redescribing and reconstructing the room in the above terms my aim is to elaborate Bachelard’s apothegm: – N.H.

2008 Nicky Hamlyn short experimental work

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

The film is composed from thirty-second long time-lapse sequences, filmed in Northwest Umbria. Condensing days into seconds, Hamlyn makes use of lap dissolves and time-lapse photography to compress the temporal duration of the Italian landscape. The film invokes some pre-cinematic technologies mainly in the shadow plays where light and shadow manifest as the movement of trees, clouds, and other objects cast by the sun project and dance onto white walls and other surfaces, emulating and interacting with the film’s grain

A video work by Nicky Hamlyn

A chronological study of the view from a single window onto the skylight of Passaporta, a bookshop in Brussels. Shot over eighteen months and making extensive use of time-lapse filming. The work is underpinned by Siegfried Kracauer's assertion that we can never exhaust the field of view.

The work is a double film loop for 16mm film projector, silent, indefinite duration. Two identical loops, ten seconds long, but one shorter than the other by one frame, run through the same projector. Every ten seconds the conjunction between the two loops changes by a frame, generating shifts in the moiré patterns generated by the superimpositions. It takes forty minutes (240 frames x 240 repetitions) to exhaust all the permutations.

Details, fragments, transformations and shadows of a confined space.

A sequence of twenty three shots of a room occurs four times, twice in colour, twice in black and white. The two colour sequences follow a strict filming plan, the second, black and white, pair are freer.

In Hole, the subject matter is a man made hole near a construction site. Employing static camera shots and conventional compositions, the film is an exploration of light, but also of scale as the filmmaker contrasts the human and feline appearances that pass through the hole

No synopsis available yet.

'Within a personal framework I have juxtaposed adverts and pornography with some domestic events to try and elucidate and undercut the way sex and the response to it occurs in cinema and advertising.' - N.H.