Close Up

12 May 2019: Guy Sherwin and Peter Todd: Recent Work followed by Q&A

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We’re thrilled to present a hybrid programme of digital videos by Guy Sherwin and 16mm films by Peter Todd. These recent works will be shown in an indeterminate way, enabling connections to be made unique to the screening. Both filmmakers will be present throughout and will participate in a discussion following the screening.


Guy Sherwin exclusively made 16mm films for many years but lately has been working on a series of digital thoughts.

Sherwin studied painting at Chelsea School of Art in the late 1960s. His subsequent film works often use serial forms and live elements, and engage with light, time and sound as fundamental to cinema. Recent works include installations made for exhibition spaces and performance collaborations with Lynn Loo working with multiple projectors and optical sound. He was guest curator of “Film in Space” an exhibition of expanded cinema at Camden Arts Centre London 2012-3. He taught printing and processing at the London Film-Makers’ Co-op (now LUX) during the mid-70s. His films were included in “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. He lives in London and teaches at Middlesex University and University of Wolverhampton.


Peter Todd works in a continuum and intuitively (film, curating, collaboration); his thoughts on “recent” and “work” are fluid.

“The objects that he has filmed, his house, a tree, a street, the underground are things that we come across every day and that seem to have come into the film by some chance operation. But he films these things with such determination, and with so much respect for their being that it seems as if they themselves had decided on the framing and the length of image and their place in the film and the filmmaker had only very conscientiously fulfilled their demands” – Renate Sami

“In the film programmes that I’ve seen of yours, I’d say there is a strand, a sort of certain strand, that runs through them, that to call it poetic would be doing it a disservice, but it’s one way, it’s such a sort of, how can I say it, it’s a loaded term which doesn’t quite describe in filmic terms, in visual terms what we mean, when we say that word, but it does conjure at any rate, perhaps an outcome the films have, they don’t have a utilitarian outcome, there is no interest in narrative, there is very often no interest in scientific or natural documentary, in capturing, it’s quiet often I’d say, for me what I get from seeing your film programmes they are trying to describe, a feeling and a sensation or a place or an interaction, very small things, and these composite of small things, actually make up a greater whole, and help us towards, not only visual enjoyment, help lead us towards having a richer life.” –  Luke Fowler