moving image

Façade re-transmits some of the flawed utopias and polarised theories suggested by Sergei Eisenstein's unmade film 'The Glass House' into a fantastical vision of contemporary glass architecture far removed from its egalitarian origins. Shot in a green screen television studio the action takes place in the non-spaces it describes conflating archive footage of plate glass manufacture with architectural 'walkthroughs' of never-to-be-built glass buildings. Narrated by TV news anchor Julia Somerville Façade casts 'glass' as a transparent subject rendered slowly opaque by the language it engenders.

Working with a production film crew and architectural visualisation specialists Miller Hare, Façade's production process implements the tools and hierarchical systems associated with corporate media production in order to reveal the constituent parts of that system.

Façade was commissioned by Arts Council England through Film London Artists' Moving Image Network, Whitstable Biennale and Futurecity, with co-support from the BFI National Archive, National Glass Centre, Miller Hare, Pilkington Group Ltd and Foggo Associates.

Screenings | Exhibitions:

>> Whitstable Biennale (2010)
>> South London Gallery (2010)
>> Whitechapel Gallery (2011)
>> Through a Glass Darkly, National Glass Centre (2011)
>> Artprojx, Armoury show, SVA Theatre, New York (2011)
>> Loop Festival Barcelona (2011)
>> Recollect, Wysing Arts Centre (2012)
>> Tableux, Assembly Point (2016)

Explores the most ubiquitous of all cultural cover versions - The film adaptation. Reading almost like a psychological test of perception 'Who goes there' is a montage of classic covers for novels adapted into screenplays. Flashing past at the rate of one cover per frame, the stream of graphic illustration is tempered by the voice of Karolin Meunier, whose hypnotic delivery describes the conditions of the famous physiological test ‘the troop effect’ - conceived to demonstrate how the left and right sides of the brain separate language and colour.

Screenings | Exhibitions:

>> Swedenbourg Film Festival, London (2016)*special mention*
>> Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Edinburgh (2016)
>> Blow-up Film Festival, Chicago (2016)
>> L'emergere del possibile (Italian Review) (2016)

Channeling the medium of knitting through film, 'Avoiding Green' explores a hitherto little known history of a small, but global, army of knitters, both at sea and onshore. The work teases out a strong kinship between these largely overlooked cogs in the global economy, and evokes the sea from their wildly different perspectives. Avoiding Green focuses particularly on the Gansey, as a specialized working garment worn by seafarers from around the coastal towns of England, Scotland and Holland.

The ancient craft of knitting is shown to be the earliest form of digital construction. Coy has combined archive footage, interviews with contemporary seafarers, knitters with images shot on a ‘depth camera’ to draws upon the intrinsic binary structure of the digital image and the physical on/off nature of knitting.

The work redresses the symbolic role that knitting took in the definition of gender stereotypes from the mid 20th Century onward, re-positioning it as an ordering principal, key to our structural understanding of the physical environment.

Screenings | Exhibitions:

>> Offshore: Artists explore the Sea, Hull Maritime Museum and Ferens Art Gallery, Hull (2017)
>> Whitechapel Gallery, London (2017)
>> Tate St.Ives, Cornwall (2018)

Revisiting Francois Truffaut's Sci-fi classic and love letter to the printed word Fahrenheit 451 the film concentrates on two scenes where commuters on a monorail are locked into autonomous self-titillating gestures. A choreographed shift allies that future vision to the distracted and consumptive malaise of todays commuting populace and the small intimate gestures they make on the touch screens of their mobile devices.

Mimicking the production process of the now familiar faked internet memes used for the purposes of marketing, as far as I know arrived initially across media formats, both through the internet in small distracted looping episodes via emailed Gif's, Vine, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram (#afaik) as then intalled for 6 months a large public LED screen.

The sense of a narrative that we would normally associate with books and a literate populous is here lost. Instead the film generates its own slowly unfolding meta-narrative, depending on how, when and where we might glimpse the film amongst the highly contested public and private mediated spaces it occupies.

Screenings | Exhibitions:

>> Focal Point Gallery - Big Screen Commission (2015)
>> BFI - London Film Festival - Experimenta (2015)
>> The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik (2016)
>> Mount Florida Screenings, Glasgow (2017)
>> Mount Florida Screenings, GoMA, Glasgow (2017)

Sons of unless and children of almost (Official Theatrical Trailer) is a marriage of two extremes cut from the symbiotic always-on immaterial labour spectacle of entertainment and commerce that we are all familiar. Sharing an illusive promise, the boredom of the meditative spinning mandala-like ‘pre-loader’ gif mirrors the high octane looping orchestral and choral samples of the Hollywood Trailer. Steadily building in a series of unresolved crescendos the act of waiting and a lack of content take center stage.

Screenings | Exhibitions:

>> BFI - London Film Festival - Experimenta (2014)

Language and property crumble in an exploration of the impact of coastal erosion on the people and landscape of North Norfolk. Concentrating on the small villages of Walcott and Cley next the Sea, the film combines interviews, field recordings and archive footage.

Features a specially commissioned soundtrack by Alexander Tucker.

Wordland was produced by Cityprojects with funding from Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust.

Art monthly review of Film & Video, Sally O'Reilly (pdf)
wordland website
city projects

Screenings | Exhibitions:

>> LUX Event at the Arclola Theatre (2008)
>> City Projects (2008)
>> Aurora Film Festival, Norwich (2008)
>> Walcott Village Hall (2008)
>> Outpost Gallery (2008)
>> Cley Village Hall (2008)
>> Peninsula Arts, Plymouth (2009)
>> Film & Video, The Russian Club, London (2010) (pdf)

>> Aldeburg Music festival, Snape Maltings (2013)
>> Whitechapel Gallery, London (2017)

A journey through the glossy images and saccharine language of the Cotswold property market. Edited from recorded telephone conversations of local Estate Agents and images of properties on the market Cataract presents an eerily unpopulated landscape punctuated by a claustrophobic language of never-ending potential. Here the legacy of The English Romantic Movement finds itself re-codified as

A large video projection of Colour bars (normally used by video and broadcast technicians to verify signal accuracy) accompanied by a live choir. The Choir commences by singing the sustained tone that normally accompanies the colour bars (440hz or concert A). Their voices are picked up by a microphone and translated in real time to produce the colours of the industry standard Colour Bars. Slowly, as the composition and timbre of individual voices begin to deviate from a set tone the colours follow, modulating the different hues within the colour spectrum.

Test Signal was realised with The New London Chamber Choir for the event Phil Coy: Test Signal, Hannah Rickards: Thunder, The South London Gallery, March 2006.

Test signal was made possible through funding from The Elephant Trust.

A single column from the newspaper The South London Press in 1887 is filmed as it is spooled through a Microfilm reader on fast forward and randomly stopped on a short segment of text every few seconds. At each stoppage a short section of the text is read out by a voiceover artist.

Microfilm reader was made during a residency at Lambeth Archives funded by Arts Council England.

Screenings | Exhibitions:

>> 198 Gallery (2005)
>> Hayward Gallery project space (2006)

Somewhere_Somewhere_Nowhere remakes the opening title sequence of Francois Truffaud's Farenheit 451. The Television aerials of the original have been replaced by satellite dishes which, like in the original film, are each filtered by colours from the ROYBGIV colour spectrum. Similarly, the narrated titles and Bernard Herman’s sound score has been replaced with sound generated by the computer program vOICe. The computer programme was developed to enable the blind to ‘see’ by recognizing colours and generating sounds according to images placed before the camera.

Screenings | Exhibitions:

>> Arcade, Westbourne Studios, London, (2006)
>> Mount Florida Screenings, Glasgow (2017)
>> Mount Florida Screenings, GoMA, Glasgow (2017)

A single screen video captures Soprano singer Germain Lewis of the Lydians Choir holding a single vibrato note at a redundant Omega tracking station in Trinidad. The tracking station is one of eight that were built and together formed the worlds first Global Navigation System. Decommissioned in 1977 the Omega system used longwave radio transmitters instead of satellites, which are the foundation of current GPS.

Omega was made during an International Artists Residency at Carribean Cultural Association (CCA) in Trinidad, funded by Arts Council England and Triangle Trust.

Screenings | Exhibitions:

>> International Fellowships Gasworks (2005)
>> EVA Bienalle, curated by Katerina Gregos, Limerick, Ireland (2006)
>> Galvanise, Trinidad (2006)
>> Scarborough Open Air theatre (2016)

275 thumbnail images collected from an internet search for ‘paradise’ played at 25 f.p.s.

Screenings | Exhibitions:

>> Hayward Gallery, Dan Grahams Waterloo Sunset (2004-5)
>> Cornerhouse (2004)
>> City Art Centre, Edinburgh (2004)
>> Sainsbury's Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (2003)

Hayward Gallery touring show 'Incommunicado' (2003-04) curated by Margot Heller. Artists in the exhibition were: Angus Fairhurst, Bruce Nauman, Chen Zhen, Christian Marclay, Erika Tan, Francesca Woodman, Hirsch Perlman, Jiri Kolar, Lawrence Weiner, Mona Hatoum, Omer Fast, Pavel Büchler, Phil Coy, Samuel Beckett and Marin Karmitz, Smith/Stewart.

In 2010 Eleven seconds of paradise was remade out of a curiosity to see how paradise had changed.

Screenings | Exhibitions (2010 version):

>> Russian Club; Phil Coy & Yuko Shiraishi (2010)
>> Digitalis (2011)

Each monitor displays a video landscape of an oil seed rape field in Norfolk and a Propane gas fired Bird Scarer within shot. Accompanied by field recordings of the countryside these otherwise serene scenes are occasionally broken by an unimpressive explosion from one or other of the fields.

A structuralist take on the process of digital and non-linear editing. The video takes a 15 second section of a passing train and loops it. With every new loop a single frame is removed so that the speed of the train appears to steadily increase. The process continues until only one frame remains and the video ends.