Aspect

In Aspect colour, light and shadow shift across the surface of the forest as the duration of a calendar year is condensed into minutes. Using photographic techniques, such as time lapse and long exposures on single film frames, the film shifts between seeing the trees as trees and the movement of light and shadow as a formal play that abstracts the real environment. Fragments of forest sounds typically unregistered, ants in their anthill, the wind across the forest floor, the crack of a twig, are reconfigured into an audio piece by Benedict Drew that articulates the film (and the forest) in an illusive and ambiguous way.

“Across the surface of the forest, light, colour, shadow shift; rhythmic, kaleidoscopic. Matter and the immaterial in constant counteraction. The screen becomes a painting in animation. Ordinarily, light describes the motif. Here, the forest is almost – almost – occluded as the light that delineates the world becomes autonomous, visible; describes itself as subject. There are some very strange effects: light and shadow grow, die back; bark shimmers; branches tremble, or clouds pass above; trees shiver in the cold, or shake in threatening gesture; sunlight flickers, on and off, like an electric bulb. The portrait lives. These films are not the index of space and objects, but a cinema of time, movement, light; flickering lashes of mesmerised eyes in the click of an aperture.” 
— Mark Edwards; extract from Invisible / Visible in Time Frames, a Stour Valley Arts Publication