Catherine Elwes

Jim Moir (aka Vic Reeves) explores Video Art, revealing how different generations ‘hacked’ the tools of television to pioneer new ways of creating art that can be beautiful, bewildering and wildly experimental.

I made a number of single monitor works in the late 1970s and the first was a video drawing of my static figure behind glass onto which Adrian Gill drew a series of lines marking out the proportions of my body as a kind of Vitruvian woman "manquee". Once again I was pointing up the shortcomings of this average female form in terms of line and contour. I was also making reference to to the plumb-line life drawing of naked women that was going on upstairs in Patrick George's studio. The second drawing on glass consisted of my body erasing Adrian's careful measurements by smearing the glass and myself with black paint. Thoroughly enjoyable. CE

I wanted to make an image of a breast that was an object of nourishment. In Oxford where I live the only place where you can bare your breast to feed a child is in the café at the Museum of Modern Art. However, bare breasts are on display on display across top rack magazines at every newsagent in the city.

Art film part of the REWIND + PLAY, An Anthology of Early British Video Art box-set.

It consists of a one-shot one-minute embrace between a male hand and its female counterpart. The image is simple and sensual and it plays out its digital coupling against the aural backdrop of summer sounds.

An elegantly simple piece with only two images, a child tapping on glass and a piano player.

Catherine Elwes, videotape. Screened at the About Time: Video, Performance and Installation by Women Artists exhibition at the ICA in 1980.