British Artists Films: Jayne Parker

Film Description

Jayne Parker discovered film as a medium when she was a sculpture student at Canterbury College of Art (1977-80). Objects, performance and gesture were combined by the camera to explore space, duration and the physical body. Soon the films became independent works. Free Show (1979) is 'a film in three acts' in which domestic events have overtones of threat as well as the circus (cutting liver, ironing a fly, plucking eyebrows). In RX Recipe (1980), a large eel in a bath is stuffed with vegetables and bandaged by a woman who then similarly binds her own leg, to whispered instructions on the soundtrack. I Cat (1980) was the first of a series of roughcast but sharply drawn animations featuring a woman, a cat and a fish.

Jayne Parker's films, videos, photographs and installations reveal a central core of concerns that are explored in many ways. Her hallmark is the focussed gaze of the camera on the body and its actions, combined with editing that draws out inner rhythms from the shot to mould an unfamiliar sense of time. A running theme is the making of art and the production of selfhood, mirrored in the performance itself and in the formal shape of the film. By embracing such nonverbal arts as music and dance, meaning in the films is produced - and questioned - by the clash or fusion of images seen from changing viewpoints and angles. - A.L.Rees, January 2005

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• Documentaries