Steppe

Steppe

Ground-sound, chain-sound, breath-sound. Eyes fixed on the horizon. Filmed from the level of the handlebars, Steppe uses a fragment of footage from a six-week cycle journey attempting to reach the Aral Sea, oscillating forwards then backwards through the twenty five frames of a second of footage.

steppe, 1999 from Louisa Fairclough on Vimeo.

1999/ 13 mins looped/ DV – to be projected large scale onto the base of wall.

Square of Ground – Jerwood Gallery, 2000 (catalogue available)

Open – Camden Roundhouse, 2000 (catalogue available)

Pizza Express Prospects – Regional (London) Winner, 2001 – selected by Sacha Craddock

D’verse II – The Lux, London, 2000

16th Hamburg Short Film Festival, 2000

Worms Gallery, Singapore, 2000

Funded by the University of London Convocation Travel Award

25 Horizons on Canvas, 2000

More writing on Steppe:

Cycling long empty stretches, nothing but road and desert, the only sounds: my breath and the wind against my ears. The rhythm of pedalling and circular breathing set a constant. This is the perfect place. Something then interrupts this space, be it a thought or a town; the moment is lost.

Keep going straight.

By dissolving the film frame by frame, the viewer becomes disorientated and loses a sense of vantage point. The landscape seems less concrete and the horizon represents a dystopian counterpoint. Our uncertain place is a flattened space. Objects appear and merge, boundaries blur and the horizon line splits. Speed is recycled into slow motion. Time stretched and dislocated. How much time is represented? Which way are we moving through this space – directly forward, from left to right or from right to left?

As my legs push down I’m getting nowhere.

(LF/ 2000)