Best known for her enigmatic and often subtly haunting paintings, artist Naomi Frears has explored the medium of moving image during the past eighteen months to create a new body of work.
The series of short films, each a minute or less, draws our attention to small details that are so often overlooked. By inviting us to slow down, to give ourselves to stillness and the quiet beauty within it, the work encourages our minds to wander and experience undirected thought.
As well as working with and learning from experts in film and sound, Frears has stepped further outside the solitary world of the studio by inviting four writers to collaborate. Each was asked to write a short text to be then spoken over the films. Kalina Christoff, a neuroscientist, writes about her research into undirected thought; Simon Garfield considers one minute as a unit of time (the length of the films); Jeremy Harding uses a rhythmic collaging of writing from different sources to respond to the sense of expectancy in the films, while Ella Frears explores the link between her voice and her mother’s images as a parallel for their relationship.
