Work made between 2020-2025 THE UNLIKENESS SERIES 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.
DELIQUESCE Dir. Vicky Smith / 2022/ 1 min loops/ UK / No Dialogue / Experimental Commissioned by Aspex with support from Victorious Festival, 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, Portsmouth)
SHEDDING Dir. Vicky Smith / 2024 / 16mm/ 4 mins / UK / No Dialogue / Experimental 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).
LE CORPS MORCELE Dir. Vicky Smith / 2025/ 16mm/ 3.5 mins / UK / No Dialogue / Experimental 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.
2020 -2010 . Not (A) Part, Vicky Smith, 2019, 6’ ‘Using dead bees contact-printed onto celluloid, Not (A) Part mourns ecological disappearance while marking time frame by frame.’ Salt Beyoğlu, Istanbul
. Noisy Licking, Dribbling and Spitting, Vicky Smith, 2014, 4’ ‘Using stained tongue as a medium and a stamping pad, this animation exposes the mouth as a visceral tool.’ Salt Beyoğlu, Istanbul
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 (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.
Stacking (2006)
Over exposure to light generates a set of stained contact printed compositions.
Skin and flesh erupt as memories penetrate and distort the surface and the film emulsion is also ripped open.
Vicky Smith 