James Edmonds
2021His work manifests in analogue films, painted gestures and long-form soundworks, occasionally combined along with found objects or materials to create immersive environments.
He has presented screenings and exhibitions at various venues, project spaces, galleries and cinema events, including Âge d’Or Festival Brussels, Process Festival Latvia, Fronteira Festival Brasil, 3 137 Athens, Macao Milan, Ausland Berlin, and Another Vacant Space Berlin. Since 2015 he also curates the film series Light Movement in Berlin.
A Return
James Edmonds
James Edmonds’s intricately constructed 16mm montage film brings two disparate settings—Berlin and a village in the South of England—into the same cinematic headspace. Locating likenesses between soft light and overcast coasts, the comfort of sun-dappled interiors and the warmth of a tree-lined field, Edmonds both summons natural juxtapositions and creates unexpected harmony through deft superimpositions.
A Return
Seasons/Patterns
James Edmonds
The flesh of time, strands of the present, in constant becoming and disappearance. One reel for each season, exposed between 2016 and 2017. Leitmotifs of flora, providing some unity within each season, as a reflection on ist atmosphere and passing presence.
Seasons/Patterns
Overland (part one)
James Edmonds, James Edmonds
A fragment of memory is briefly evoked. The memory of a boat journey, of traveling as a child. The child is born into the universe in a flurry of images which constantly shift between modes of chromatic reality. The substances of the earth and it's elements circulate and accumulate in material fluctuation. Part of the longer film OVERLAND
Overland (part one)
Sternwarten der Welt (2021 expanded version)
James Edmonds
Various thoughts and reflections about life at its points of juncture. Symbols, delusions, loves and despondencies, arising in a wave of the unknown. A journey to find a half remembered man-made lake on the edge of a city. Shot on outdated reversal film, its images are awash with hues of translucent blue and green, white-outs and heavy indigo shadows. Appearances of a sun dial, an observatory, of other attempts to document the sun and the stars appear as symbols in a personal journey, along with animals and nature, leading the way ahead, to continue to doccument the light.
Sternwarten der Welt (2021 expanded version)
Fleeting Landscape
James Edmonds
An imaginary filmic landscape that uses fragments of the real world seen in flight, as the camera moves almost continuously and rapidly through various passages of transit. Certain structures recur as significant landmarks of this fiction -the repeating patterns of towers and masts seem to fade into one another like an unknown omnipresence.
Fleeting Landscape
Inside/Outside
James Edmonds
A fictional architecture of interiors and exteriors made through intuitive observations with the lens. The juxtaposition of the two spaces act as both metaphor and experiential resonance for the inner and outer worlds of the self, as well as being a quietly autobiographical documentation of a life between two places.
Inside/Outside
Seasons/Patterns (silent version)
James Edmonds
The flesh of time, strands of the present, in constant becoming and disappearance. One reel for each season, exposed between 2016 and 2017. Leitmotifs of flora, providing some unity within each season, as a reflection on its atmosphere and passing presence.
Seasons/Patterns (silent version)
Fragments/Structures (silent full-speed version)
James Edmonds
Brief vignettes of selected urban scenery are presented with intervals of blank space offering colourful impressionistic glimpses into small details of a costal town. The materials and detritus, people and architecture - fragments from everyday life, are collected through the ritualistic patterns of single-frame shooting, forming structures directly on the filmstrip as they are discovered, just as pebbles are collected on a walk across a beach.
Fragments/Structures (silent full-speed version)
Configurations
James Edmonds
Distant places, stations, loved ones, natural interiors and exteriors, lights, shadows, paintings, colors, and compositions. A rich bouquet of motifs that Edmonds arranges into intuitive configurations of differences and similarities, and where emotions and memories fuse with a singular formal conception of cinema.
Configurations
Movement and Stillness
James Edmonds
Quiet observations, variations of light, from strong amber glows to diffused greys, intermittently entering the windows of an internal world. A film about coming home, archetypal images where the eternal meets the temporal. Calm reflection interspersed with travel and the endless search for significant forms, personal chapters of collage and remnants.
Movement and Stillness
After Hours
James Edmonds
Shooting on 8mm film and making field recordings on cassette tape, recorded patterns of light and sound become a low quality, dreamlike plane of stillness, silence and uncertainty, exploring the passing of time through the study of vacant institutional spaces. The transitory spaces of these mundane but haunting buildings become an obsolete reality of forgotten ideals, the filmstrip itself a receiver of these resonances.
After Hours
