Materials: slide projectors, stepper motor, black foil and rear projection screen.

I often draw on the pictorial traditions of still life and landscape and the use of repetitive, hypnotic movement, resulting in works that explore materiality, entropy and cycles of time; evoking states stretching between past, present and future.

For Tops the images in four slide projectors are animated using a spinning shutter disc. The four frames capture the illusion of movement and the details of reflection, sparks and smoke.

With this piece I wanted to explore an extended moment, with a still life only barely becoming a moving image. In the work there is a layering of three time periods and three spatial layers; momentary sparks and smoke, the duration the spinning top is upright and the timeframe of the landscape.

The work was, in part, inspired by the Charles and Ray Eames’ film Tops from (1969).