To disrupt your laziness, put the resources of goodwill to use, walk beside me and do not loose sight of this madman - his head crowned with tupperware, his hand armed with a stick who drives before him one who you would have difficulty recognising, did I not take care to warn you, and whispering in your ear recall the name pronounced Mervyn! How changed he is! Hands tied behind his back, he walks straight ahead as if he were going to the scaffold, and yet he is guilty of no crime. They have reached Nelson's column. From the entablature of the massive column, standing where Nelson should have been, more than 50 metres above ground level, a man waves. He throws down a rope which falls right down to the ground, onto the feet of Aghone. With practise one does a thing quickly: but I may say the latter did not take long to tie Mervyn's feet to the end of the line.

The rhinoceros had learned of what was about to happen. Covered with sweat, it appeared puffing and blowing at the corner of Whitehall. It did not even have the satisfaction of joining the fray. The character who was scanning the neighbourhood from the top of the column cocked his revolver, and took careful aim. The commodore, who had been begging in the streets since the day when what he took to be his son's madness began, and the mother-who because of her pallor was called The Daughter of Snow - interposed their own breasts to shield the Rhinoceros. Useless pains. The bullet drilled it's hide like a gimlet; one might have imagined, that death must infallibly occur. But we knew that into this pachyderm the substance of the Lord had entered. He withdrew with chagrin.

The man on the column , with a quick flick of the wrist, pulled towards him the line thus ballasted. Put out of perpendicular, it's oscillations swing Mervyn too and fro, head downwards. The jailbird with his right hand imparts to the youth an accelerated motion of uniform rotation, in a plain parallel to the axis of the column. The sling hisses in space; Mervyn's body follows it everywhere, ever distanced from the centre by centrifugal force, ever keeping it's mobile and equidistant position in an ariel circumference independent of matter. The civilised savage gradually lets go - right to it's far end.

This movement has the effect of changing the original plane of the rope's revolution, and increasing it's already quite considerable tensile stress. Henceforeward it turns majestically on a horizontal plane, after passing successively in an imperceptible progression through several oblique planes. The right angle formed by the column and the vegital yarn has equal sides! The renegade's arm and the murderous instrument have merged in linear unity, like the atomistic elements of a ray of light penetrating the camera obscura. The theorems of mechanics permit me to talk thus; alas it is known that one force added to another force yields a resultant composed of the sum of the two original forces!

Who would dare assert that the linear line would have broken already but for the vigour of the athlete, but for the good quality of the hemp? ... Maldoror at the same time abruptly arrests his attained speed, opens his hand and lets go the rope. Mervyn, followed by the cord, resembles a comet trailing after it its flaming tail. In the course of the parabola the doomed man cleaves the air as far as Kensington, passes it by virtue of propulsive force - which I take to be infinite, and his body hits the dome of the Royal Albert Hall. There upon its spherical and convex surface area which resembles an orange only in shape, at any hour of the day or night a wasted skeleton may be seen, stuck hanging. When the wind blows it, the people of Kensington, for fear of a similar fate, are reported to say a short prayer: these are trifling rumours which one isn't obliged to believe, only fit for scaring little children: go and see for yourselves if you are loath to believe me.

 

 

Filmography

SHARONY!
2000, 10.5 mins digital video featuring Daisy Burchill, Lydia Burchill and the band Dograck
The story of two young girls who dig up a microscopic woman from the back garden and make her 'Grow' using pornographic wallpaper... Commissioned for the big show 'GIRL' at the New Art Gallery Walsall, then cut at the last minute as the curator was 'shocked' by it...

4 Ways he tried to tell you
1999, 7 mins Digital video, digital video animation and Super 8 Film with model animation and human pixilation. Voice: Philip Thomas, the Man:Theo Cowley
This is a video about the thing that won1t go away, it has been trying to contact me by altering bits of my reality for several years now"...another experimental metaphysical mystery that is going down well in the US.

Born in 1963 in Hertfordshire, England, the daughter of a physicist, I am uncommonly small for my age. For the last seven years I have been making films, videos and performance pieces that develop my own idiosyncratic fusion of experimental writing/storytelling, stop frame animation, film tricks, and digital video special effects. I also make paintings.

I am a founder member of the Exploding Cinema: Set up in 1991, we are a non profit collective of film and video makers, with which I have toured my work several times throughout Europe and the U.S. through a variety of underground film and performance club scenes.

My work has also been screened and performed internationally at more "over ground" venues, most recently at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, and makes regular appearances on the international Underground/ Experimental Film Festival Scene. I earn a living by being a part time lecturer at Wimbledon School of Art and live in Nunhead with a black cat called Olive and Paul Tarrago.

and oh yes.. if there's any space could you put that I have a compilation of my work (42 mins) that is for sale called "6 pieces from my head" (they can e mail me for more details) Mucho thanko!!!!!!

jennet@wroxton.greatxscape.net

The Mr. Cole Trilogy
1997, 98- ongoing performance and video in three 10 minute sections
When walking in the park I find patches of the earth that make loud noises when I step on them- underneath the grass are mathematically encoded messages, of a desperate nature -this is how. Mr. Cole begins his relationship with me.

Victims of F.A.T.E.
1998 12 minutes A Video Artist Residency at the Whitechapel Art Gallery
A multi media computer animation video project extravaganza about fantasy time travel, made collaboratively with groups of local people. I Used Chroma key to put people into their own animted landscapes..to fight future wars and past childhood fears.

Important Toy
1997, 8: 20 mins. Digital video. Digital Video effects, live action and model/object animation. Girl: Lydia Burchill, Mother:Liz Burchill, sister: Daisy Burchill, Additional camerawork: Paul Tarragó
A young girl buys a weird toy from a charity shop - she forms such an intense relationship with it that it develops special ways of communicating, and a strange connection to her that seems to defy the laws of physics.

How I got Stuck in their Brains
1997, 9 min. Digital video animation \ multi media collage arising from the Whitechapel Art Gallery Video Artist's Residency
Using the nightmares/ dreams narrated to me by participating adolescents, animations of their plasticene 3demons/bogeymen2and their chroma-keyed body-antics, all shrunk digitally and put into a model landscape and woven into an improbable story.

Gorgeous Operation
8 minutes, 1996 Super and Single 8 Film
A story about a man who thought there was something wrong with his eye...so he goes to the doctor, who can1t help him much, so he tries to do the operation himself, with uplifting but tragic results.

What are you doing with your fingers?
1996, 6 mins. Digital video, Live action, digital video effects, human pixilation and model animation. Woman: Jennet Thomas, Additional Camera: Paul Tarragó
Featuring myself as a woman who is lured in to the garden by the insane cries of foliage, then turned into something pink and squirmy

Heck
1995, 5 mins Super 8 projection with live performance
Featuring my father as an angry slow man on the beach and a strange puffy white thing that lives in the garden at night. Poetic monologue declaimed with chorus.

I'm So Sorry
1995, 10 mins Video projection with live performance and Super 8 - super imposition projection with (very home made) Special effects.
My father is rather depressed and bored, and finds small blue patches appearing on his body...but soon an alien in the from of a wig comes through the post to help him.

Heady
1994, 8 mins Super 8 Film, cut out animation, model and object animation
Starring an inflatable wig holder that I got at a car boot sale in Bremmen, that escapes from Ideal Home Hell, journeys to Poland and animates itself over the alpine countryside. A very popular film.

The Real Hamster Film
1994, 5 mins Super 8 Model Animation film projection with performance/narration text
A film about real hamsters and non-real (Undead?)hamsters, another exploration of my fantasy metaphysics, and what may happen to things you love when they die.