Sculpture

The sculpture is the place where I began and it is the heart of the work. The sculptures were filmed and edited to suggest a journey from darkness to light. Like most journeys there are difficulties and setbacks and these I saw as black spaces punctuating the groups of sculpture.

The sculptures are figurative but not realistic. Maybe as a filmmaker I was bound to find a story within them. Sculpture essentially captures and freezes a moment. I took these moments and put some movement into them, setting them in a time line that gives each one a before and after.

I wanted to have the feeling of not being quite able to see, of things moving and indistinct, of nightmares lurking unseen in the shadows.

To this end I used some archive footage. I looked at everything I could find in the Imperial War museum archive about concentration camps.

                 

And I also used an Archive resource called Footage Farm who searched for me and came up with some interesting stuff. At the Imperial War Museum I saw footage from Belsen that I have never seen before, some more horrifying and some which gave a sense of daily life. The footage is mostly unedited. There is a sequence where the cameraman is filming what must have been impossibly shocking discoveries of bodies strewn around, bodies being bulldozed into mass graves. images we have seen used a thousand times but what I have never seen is how the camera suddenly turns away. Between the