BILL LESLIE - SCULPTURE FILM PHOTOGRAPHY

FILMS

Score for Six Small culptures

This video was made for ACTS the Stanley Picker Public Lectures digital programme 2020. A series of small sculptures are placed in front of the camera. Each object was made in response to household objects used earlier this summer during lockdown, in a video made as part of a Digital Residency with Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center. The aim was to catch the spontaneity and playfulness of the original objects. The result, something like a set of odd instruments and children's toys which are played for the camera, creating an ad hoc choreography of movement and sound.

This film was made in response to video experiments made as part of Leap Then Look's Active Archive Digital Residency at Black Mountain COllege Museum and Art Center. Click here to go to the digital exhibition.

What Happens When Sculptures are Made to be Filmed? Split Screen

Split-screen digital video

One iteration of montaged footage from four years exploring sculptures in front of the camera. Originally screened on 3 separate projectiors, one on it's side, the different refresh rates of the media player meant that the three videos shifted in relation to one another as the evening progressed. Each subsequent time the work was shown a new edit would be made.

9 Objects

Hand-processed, high contrast black and white reversal film.
16mm, 100ft.

What happens to sculptures when they are filmed? Do the particular qualities of the media affect the objects that appear? How do they ask to be moved and handled?

Shot in sequence, 9 Objects is a choreography for film. One object after another, presented for the camera. A demonstration, but for who?

Pieces of Wood (2016)

Phantom Slow-motion HD video 5 minutes
Sound:'Music for Pieces of Wood' by Steve Reich

Shot at 1000fps this film explores the quality of slow motion and its ability to transform. The sculptures were made with this technology in mind. They have no top or bottom and were designed to tumble in space.

Some of my sculptures move from left to right (2016)

HD Video, no sound, 9 minutes

A sequence of sculptures process in front of the camera, their texture and surface emphasised by the high fidelity of the image.

There it is, right in front of us. The object on the screen. (2014)

HD Video, voice over, 15 minutes
Narrated by Rachel Boot

A mediation on the life of an object, imagined through a text which circles around a small bronze statue. The camera mirrors the movement of the text, circling, probing and revealing aspects of the statue through extreme close-up and obtruse camera angles.

Things Being Themselves(2013)

SD Video, no sound, 5 minutes

A video which accompanied photographic prints and installed objects. The small ceramic hand sculptures are reframed and reimagined by the camera.

Perfect Geometry (2012)

SD Video 14 minutes
Sound by Darren Pickles

Brightly coloured structures slowly revolve in space, at times seemng vast and monumental at others becoming bars of colour which slide across the screen accompanied by the ebb and hum of electronic sound.

And Through the Wtaer's Thickness (2012)

Hand-processed Super 8 colour reversal film, 6 minutes.

A series of shots exploring the 1975 Naum Gabo fountain Revolving Torsion. This film explores the augmentation of sculptural form, contrastign the environmental conditions - the mist and encroaching dawn, the the water spraying and cascading down from the structue - with the texture of the film itself - the marks and scratches, the variations in colour and tone and the constant drift created by pieces of emusion stuck to the celluloid.

113 Years Later(2011)

Black and White Super 8 Film, no sound, 3:30 munites

A film shot to accompany an installation in the window of the Permanent Gallery, Brighton. This film was shown on a screen in the shopfront opposite to the gallery. Lighting techniques were used to explore the structural and architectural qualities of the objects.

Images of Wonder (2010)

Colour Super 8 Film with sound, 9 minutes.

A collection of sculptures of various types and sizes parade in front of the camera, their odd forms emphasised by the pops and quirks of the soundtrack. The soundtrack was made with a collage of found material. This film was influences by early sci-fi, 1970s animation, B-movies and modernist sculpture.