Studied painting at Chelsea School of Art, London in the 1960s. His subsequent film works, often including live elements and serial forms, are characterised by an enduring concern with light and time as the fundamentals of cinema. Recent works include multi-screen projection and gallery installations.
Sherwin taught printing and processing at the London Filmmaker's Co-op (now LUX) during the mid-70s. His films have been widely exhibited in England and abroad, as part of 'Film as Film' Hayward Gallery 1979, 'Live in Your Head' Whitechapel Gallery 2000, 'Shoot Shoot Shoot' Tate Modern 2002, 'A Century of Artists' Film & Video' Tate Britain 2003/4; also shown on BBC2, Channel 4 and Arte TV France. Solo shows include San Francisco Cinematheque, LUX London, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Image Forum Tokyo.
He lives in London and teaches at Middlesex University, London, the University of Wolverhampton and periodically at the San Francisco Art Institute.
A newspaper glued onto clear film is projected as audio-visual
typography. A film made without a camera.
“I glued a Sunday newspaper onto clear 16mm film then punched out the
clogged-up sprocket holes to enable the film to run through the
projector. Then I shone a strong light through this 'newspaper-film'
to copy it onto another strip of film. This shows up the letters and
words clearly, which can also be heard as they pass over the
sound-head in the projector.” G.S.
1972, 16mm, black & white, sound, 5 minutes, $20 Rental
A hand-made film of a circular form which fluctuates through rhythms of light and sound.
“Cycles 1 is made by sticking paper dots onto the surface of the film and to its (optical) sound track. On projection these separate instants are converted simultaneously into picture and sound. The gaps between the dots gradually decrease until a fusion of the material occurs; the separate image-moments coalesce into a pulsating ball of light; simultaneously we hear rhythmic sounds fusing into a continuous rising drone.
These transformations are taking place in our perceptual systems; if we examine the physical strip of film, no such change is seen. Apparently we register time through our optical and our aural senses in very different ways, one chemical, the other mechanical. Visual information can only be 'processed' at a maximum of 12 separate samples (frames) per second, whereas with sound our sensitivity is greater, up to 30 per second. Below these frequencies we can distinguish separate moments in time, above them we can't.” G.S.
1972/77, 16mm, black & white, sound, 5 minutes, $20 Rental
Academy countdown leader, including the sound 'beep', is transformed by multi-layered printing.
“A found-footage film made entirely from Academy leader, which is normally used to cue the start of films. The film was hand-printed on a home-made contact printer. It was rolled back and re-printed several times over, to create a complex layering of both image and sound. The film explores displacements of a positive and negative copy of the same loop. Since the printer light also covers the sound-track area, both picture and sound undergo identical transformations.” G.S.
1974, 16mm, black & white, sound, 5 minutes, $20 Rental
"... Guy Sherwin's SHORT FILM SERIES which he undertook between 1976 and 1980. Eventually he issued about thirty of them. Some are single studies of light, focused on the reflections in an eye shot in close-up. Others are domestic, as in the PORTRAIT WITH PARENTS or BREATHING .... Many deal with two rates of time measurement, as in CLOCK AND CANDLE, or construct visual paradoxes, as in the shuddering stasis of METRONOME - an illusion caused by the clash between the spring-wound mechanisms of the Bolex camera and of the metronome itself. In BARN DOOR the semi-strobe effect of light pulsations flattens the distant landscape. ... Interestingly, Sherwin has recently returned to the series after almost twenty years, with studies of animals and insects which in part recall the fascination with the 'invisible' side of nature felt by the surrealists, and seen in the scientific writing of Roger Caillois and the films of Jean Painleve during the 1930s. ..." - A.L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video, pp. 81-82
1975-1999 (ongoing), 16mm, b&w/si, 33m, $100
In MUSICAL STAIRS, 16mm footage of an iron staircase was printed to produce both picture and soundtrack images, i.e., the optical sound sensor in the projector reads the photographs of iron steps as variable density soundtrack. The staircase is filmed from a fixed perspective, producing for the soundtrack a musical scale of eleven stages determined by the camera angles. Sound volume and image brightness were both controlled by varying the exposure setting at the printing stage. The fact that the staircase is neither a synthetic image, nor a particularly clean one (there happened to be leaves on the stairs when I shot the film) means that the sound is not pure, but dense with strange harmonies.
1977, 16mm, b&w/so, 10m, $30
A widescreen two-projector version is part of The Train Films
The sound of lights passing through a darkened landscape seen from a moving train.
“Night Train may be seen as continuing the Vertovian tradition of employing film to reveal phenomena not normally visible to the naked eye.
Night Train was shot from a moving train at night, using time exposures of half a second per frame. The camera records passing lights as traces, so the nearer the objects to the train, the longer the trace. This results in the familiar travel experience whereby we appear to pass nearer objects faster than distant ones. here this translates into a black screen with abstract horizontal white lines, distant light sources making short feint lines, nearer ones long and bright lines.
The judder of the train also affects the quality of the trace, imparting a zigzag which makes it look even more like an ECG scan. The lines draw themselves onto the celluloid, or rather the train draws itself across the light sources, making lines in the same way that a glacier acquires striations from the rocks it passes. Thus one thinks of the film shooting itself, in the sense that it is a set-up/procedure which is allowed to run its course unimpeded.
Because of the brevity of each frame, the film is copied many times onto another strip of film, each time shifted forward by one frame, thereby extending the duration of each frame to almost half a second. These extended frames overlap both physically and temporally, and one sees several traces building up on the screen. The traces also generate sound as they scan across the optical sound reader in the projector). The continuous flow pauses once or twice when the train stops at a station and a naturalistic image abruptly forms. The striking contrast between these two kinds of image forces us to rethink our experience of night travel. We conceive of the distant lights and the railway stations as roughly the same kinds of thing, yet the visual trace of these presents us with images so distinct as to seem mutually exclusive beyond the common denominator of light.” —Nicky Hamlyn. Coil Magazine. Nov 2000.
1979, 16mm, black & white, sound, 2 minutes, $20 rental
"[MESSAGES is] a diary-essay recording the development of language, in words and drawings, of his young daughter Maya. It is also a study of the world of trees, water and the passage of time. Intensely beautiful images of shadows of leaves falling on the open pages of a book, a voluminous tree moving in and out of focus, becoming a dark almost abstract mass, a hand plunging into a stream to pluck out a stone and so on. The film is silent with text superimposed - usually questions or comments by the young girl - which show the innocence and incisiveness of childhood. The film inextricably associates these with the perceptions of the artist. ... MESSAGES can be understood as a representation of the artistic process itself." - Michael O'Pray
1981-1983, 16mm, b&w/si, 35m, $105
First film in the ongoing Freeway Series.
Street-life at a busy intersection beneath a freeway in San Francisco. An urban landscape film with an underlying formal structure.
“Under the Freeway results from a trip Sherwin made to San Francisco during 1995. The space of the film is a public one; an intersection of streets in a poor neighbourhood, dominated by the overhead freeway of the title. The camera is static, although not confined to a single viewpoint, and this elicits a quiet attention from the viewer.
Under the Freeway presents us with urban life at the sharp end, its on-the-street detail unseen by those rushing by overhead. Under the freeway life proceeds at a different pace - in its examination of the cityscape the film offers space and time to observe city life, one's sense of closeness to, or distance from the reality represented controlled in part by the coming and going of the sound. The framing offers continually interesting compositions in deep space as well as an evolving sense of the film's complex urban location. It is tempting to see, in the pace of the shots and the pace of the actions filmed, a critique of both life in the world of the freeway, and of its customary film or television representation¹.” —Nick Collins. notes for an Arts Council screening, Tate Gallery 1997
1995, 16mm, colour, sound, 16 minutes, $50 Rental
A study of time, memory and actuality that takes place in the backyard of the house where my daughter grew up.
“Prelude draws us into a state of transfixedness through the static gaze of its camera. Looking out from an unseen window onto the backyard of an urban terraced house, we see a little girl with a watering can, playing in a strip of sunlight which runs obliquely up the frame; the filmmaker sits on a window ledge, only his legs visible, bouncing a ball. As the film progresses, other states of weather make brief appearances; the light fades in intensity or snaps back to the intense brightness. The angle of the light projected across the courtyard changes; a swing appears, casting a sharp shadow; the yard reverts to its initial state.
Almost an essay in creating - in quietly compelling - a state of attention through a particular use of sound and image, Prelude draws our attention to the miraculous capacity of film to re-assemble a reality which we customarily take for granted. Here the reality before the camera, itself carefully assembled, is reworked as if it were memory (the footage comprising the film was shot in 1980 and 1985, but constructed into a film only recently). The ball bounces on the cement and returns to the hand that propelled it, uninterrupted, across the join between two shots, one in shadow and the other lit by brilliant sunlight. The shadow of the swing suddenly changes shape and position. The sudden disappearance and reappearance of the sound - trees rustling, traffic, pigeons cooing - seems to drop the viewer from actuality into memory and vice versa.
Beneath the impression which 'Prelude' makes at the level of representation, film's materiality is acknowledged. the fixed camera position reminds us that events in any film take place as a form of shadow-play. The flare-outs which mark the endings of rolls of film offer moments of 'pure' projector light, devoid of image despite the presence of film in the gate of the projector. The sound cuts in and out, and in places the presence of loop construction suggests itself subtly.” —Nick Collins. Arts Council Programme. Tate Gallery 1997.
1996, 16mm, black & white, sound, 12 minutes, $35 Rental
Funded with a grant from the Arts Council of England.
"... shifts of attention from one plane to the other."
1998, 16mm, b&w/so, 9m, $30
1998, 16mm, b&w/so, 4m, $20
A series of meditations on the animal kingdom, comprising both physical and metaphysical reflection.
“Animal Studies is an ongoing set of films of inconsequential animal movements which are hand-printed in a variety of ways, using changes of light, geometry, time.
These processes reveal what might be hidden in the frames and photographic depths of the material, as well as constructing a way of looking in relation to their subject.
My filmic interest in animals is that they are unselfconscious, authentic, and can't act.
Animal Studies relates to and overlaps the Short Film Series (begun in 1975). The beauty of working in a series lies in its procedural open-endedness and flexibility, up to and beyond the point of projection. This flexibility of connection extends to works outside the series such as Flight and Filter Beds (both 1998) and the three screen installation Three Trees (2003).
Tree Reflection has been shown as a looped gallery installation; other films in the series can also be adapted for continual projection.” G.S.
A re-groupable series of films.
1998-2004, 16mm, black & white, silent, 25 minutes, $75 Rental
Variations on a Train with Anna.
2000, 16mm, 9m, color/so, $30
“An industrial chimney seen from a passing train, is edited in phased repetition of both sound and image. Part of the series The Train Films 1977-2003. A silent version of this film was included in my earlier Short Film Series.” G.S.
2000, 16mm, black & white, sound, 4 minutes, $20 Rental