Filmography

Many of Vicky’s films are part of the LUX collection of Artist Moving Image and Lightcone. Selected works can be seen on Vimeo

THE UNLIKENESS SERIES

Spinning / Deliquesce / Shedding / Le Corps Morcele

Work of the last five years is clarifying into what I’m calling the Unlikeness series. Comprising Spinning (2023); Shedding (2024); Deliquesce (2022) and Le Corps Morcele (2025) hand processing and methods of superimposition render the figure as ethereal or dense, fragmented and unfamiliar. While photography is celebrated for its capacity to capture a perfect likeness, in this set of films hand processing and experimental methods of superimposition render the figure as ethereal or dense, as fragmented and unfamiliar.

Le Corps Morcele, Vicky Smith (2025) 16mm, 3.5‘

Animation, performance and hand processed black & white film combine to describe the body repeatedly succumbing to gravity and to horizontality. Pixilation, typically used to attribute physical superpowers, in this case renders actions that are suspended, directionless and thwarted. As multiple superimpositions accrue, the individual body is submerged by a mass of limbs.

Shedding, Vicky Smith (2024), 16mm silent, 4‘

“A performance for the Bolex camera that captures the ethereal interplay between celluloid and the physical body. In this silent auto-portrait, experimental animator Vicky Smith uses multiple exposures and varying frame rates to cycle through intimate iterations of the self, summoning an effect both corporeal and ghostly.” – Melbourne International Film Festival, 2025

Deliquesce, Vicky Smith (2022)16mm looped, 1′

“Commissioned by Aspex with support from Victorious Festival, Portsmouth, the artist uses visual metaphor to explore concerns about coastal pollution. The film is part of a series of self portraits in which the artist represents her body as unruly. In this case, the sea is a medium that entangles Smith in seaweed, bubbles and reflections of sunlight, and as described by the title, the artist’s body and hair becomes somewhat liquid.” – Vickie Fear, Aspex

Not (A) Part, Vicky Smith (2019) 6’, 16mm with sound

Not (A) Part was realised as part of collaborative project ‘Little Things Rule the World‘ with geographer Merle Patchett (UOB), literary scholar, Rachel Murray (Loughborough University) and artist, Vicky Smith (Bristol Experimental Expanded Film) supported by The Brigstow Institute.

“Using dead bees contact-printed onto celluloid, Not (A) Part mourns ecological disappearance while marking time frame by frame.” – Salt Beyoğlu, Istanbul

“Not(a)part asks us to bear in mind that even singular bodies can be understood as accumulations of physical parts of disarticulated data to be collected and managed” – Tess Takahashi (2024) The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema

Small Things Moving in Unison, Vicky Smith (2018), 5’21

Thousands of tiny perforations are made directly into 16mm black leader. These repetitive physical actions generate marks that describe relational fields.

Primal, Vicky Smith (2016), 16mm, 10′

Primal is an abstract animation made directly onto the filmstrip. Through contact actions of rubbing and scraping, light is released from unprocessed fogged negative. Similarly the sounds are made through tactile processes of rubbing materials against the mic and emphasize the rawness and inchoate urgency of the visual marks. The film is a meditation upon energy, matter, the life force and the animating principle.

Noisy Licking, Dribbling and Spitting, Vicky Smith (2014) 4’

The film is made with the mouth alone. Licking, dribbling and spitting directly onto film generates image and audio alike. I stained my tongue and then pressed it onto the filmstrip as though it were a stamping pad. I left a 40-frame gap between first tongue and the next print and then reduced each new impression by 1 frame. The licking section intersects with dribbling – where two methods of printing and painting overlap and are brought together through the physical.
“Using stained tongue as a medium and a stamping pad, this animation exposes the mouth as a visceral tool.” – Salt Beyoğlu, Istanbul

33 Frames a Foot, Vicky Smith (2013)

In this piece I stamp my painted foot on the filmstrip, which, at 33 frames, falls short of the universal measure of 40 frames. The work is very much about how to disrupt the conventions of cinema by breaking the pre-existing measurements and divisions of film, but further I conceive it as a feminist gesture in the way that Carolee Schneemann does in her referring to her daubing of her own cum on film material as ‘feminising film’.

Bicycle Tyre Track, Vicky Smith (2012)

This physical performance with film reassigns the bicycle into a camera. The idea developed in relation to methods deployed by former tutors of mine who made films and performances from ‘womens’ tools of the sewing machine and the pram to exploit the features these objects shared with the cinema apparatus. This piece continues my research into how to register the image on film without using a camera, and involves aim, balance and pressure. It draws attention to the fallible human body as it wavers from mechanic efficiency and regulation.

‘Physical Films’ are performed or performative films. They depart from the manual method of marking directly on film, employing instead actions that are repetitive and semi-automatic, such as walking and licking . The 16mm filmstrip is narrow and so the event of marking it is composed of restricted gestures. This effects a reversal, in that the body making contact with film becomes mechanized, while film is corporealised, generating imagery that is neither purely organic nor mechanical. The traces of semi -irregular impressions that remain on the film index the difficulty of attempting to perform along this long thin surface. The patterned, repetitive yet uneven imagery suggest the mixed non- camera marking sources of body and bike.