A cinematic investigation into perspective, scale and observation, Model Village explores what place the pastoral Alpine idyll holds in the imagination.

The model village’s mysterious past is explored via a found photo album, postcards, sound and field recordings.

Are we the observer or is it us who are being observed?

Natural Vision, Form and Flight and Lunar Visions playfully explore the way our engagement with the natural world has been informed by the framing of nature by art.

From the framing of the landscape by British romantic painting through the experiments of modernism, Natural Vision and Form and Flight ask us to think again about the way perspective and the phenomena of nature are colonised and represented to us through visual trickery. The films give an altered vision of landscape in an extended inquiry into perspective and how landscapes are creatively perceived, constructed and altered through the medium of (16mm) film via illusion, framing and exposure.

Form and Flight was installed with the other two films of the trilogy A Natural Vision as part of A Murmuration (2015) at ONCA gallery, Brighton and at the Lookout, Aldeburgh (2016) as a single screen work.

Natural Vision, Form and Flight and Lunar Visions playfully explore the way our engagement with the natural world has been informed by the framing of nature by art.

Lunar Visions explores the moon as an ‘imagined’ environment – a site for invention, experienced primarily through photography and film. Fascination with the moon is present, for instance, in cinema’s earliest experiments (Méliès). Very few people will ever experience it directly, and yet we think we know the moon’s surface and its geography.

Combining archive film and new material shot on location and in the studio, this film combines early cinema’s illusionary techniques with a reworking of familiar images (moonscapes), reconstructed scenes (smoke clouds, paper moons) and the idea of flight (birds/Brancusi’s bird sculptures) to investigate the fantasy that frames exploration.

Lunar Visions was installed with the other two films of the trilogy A Natural Vision as part of A Murmuration (2015) at ONCA gallery, Brighton and at the Lookout, Aldeburgh (2016) as a projected installation.

Natural Vision is a study in perspective – comparing obscured landscapes of mist, clouds and light with constructed landscapes of rocks, parsley and paper. It is inspired by Degas’ use of tissue models for clouds, Constable’s trees of broccoli and the rocks and stones used to depict mountain landscapes in Italian Renaissance painting.

The film gives an altered vision of landscape with its continued inquiry into perspective and how landscapes are creatively perceived, constructed and altered through the medium of 16mm film via illusion, framing and exposure.

The sound for Natural Vision is composed of field recordings and birdsong, with music from found reel-to-reel tapes. It responds to the film’s romantic imagery and the pursuit of the landscape painter, in their attempt to replicate a natural scene through the use of improvised objects.

Natural Vision was installed with the other two films of the trilogy A Natural Vision as part of A Murmuration (2015) at ONCA gallery, Brighton in a modified silent version.

An assembled found footage landscape using an expanded palette, accompanied by a composition of field recordings from Derek Taylor’s sound archive.

The Grand Tour, filmed in Paestum, Italy, is recreated in a South London garden using DIY model sets and postcard backdrops.

Harris’ continuing fascination with optical illusion is playfully presented – from the ancient Greeks’ original interest in shifting perspectives to miniature landscapes conjured from postcards, scissors and film.

Filmed in the 1936 Berlin Olympia Stadium and the Kuppelsaal, Crossing Points exploits the interplay between memory, history and architecture.

Interweaving images of the empty venues with sequences of two fencers performing a series of choreographed gestures, a dialogue is created between architectural sites of historical significance and legacy.

Cremer is an abstract document of a lost studio, not easily categorised, occupying the spaces between a photograph, a document and a film. It is a collaborative record and examination of a fire and resulting smoke damage that took place in the studio in 2006. As film is exposed to light, the studio was exposed to smoke, leaving a shadow or imprint on all surfaces, almost appearing as ‘x-ray’ images.

In the time that’s elapsed since making the film there is also now a broader suggestion of the current demise of film as a material. The work holds multiple meanings in its subject, image and surface.

Whilst melancholy in tone, and a lament to the loss of the studio and all its related filmmaking elements, it also points to film’s ultimate resistance to destruction.

Located in a proscribed area of London Sideways explores the shadows of surrounding buildings to construct a secondary city landscape. By inverting the urban environment, the camera searches and reveals traces that commonly go unnoticed, creating forms from light and dark. Detailed surfaces and textures of the city’s fabric create a filmed drawing with a musical structure exposing transitory spaces.

Filmed in Greensplat, (a Cornish tin-mining area) the film explores constructed landscapes. The text from Kenneth Clark’s book Landscape into Art (1949) highlights the influences behind notions of ideal landscapes, as the tools of construction are revealed in the landscape viewed.