for Graham Ellard:
" FOSSIL focuses on the Royal Academy’s collection of historic architectural casts, copies of antique columns, capitals and friezes. They were once used as teaching aides at the RA Schools. But, since the Architecture School closed in the 1950s, these casts were hidden behind temporary walls.
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This film records the precarious revealing of the casts and their ungainly demounting. Their removal was undertaken by hand, using webbing, ropes, pulleys and physical force in much the same way that they were installed in the mid-nineteenth century.
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Periods of intense colour punctuate the immersive, large-scale film projection. In these sequences, the casts evoke Jean Painlevé’s eerie underwater films of crustaceans, molluscs and seahorses, or the encrusted shipwrecks in Jacques Cousteau’s early film, Silent World. The casts are re-imagined as ancient life forms, now fossilized, that have been secreted from the walls of the RA Schools Studios...With special thanks to:
Jeremy Keenan for help and expertise in designing and programming the frame driven colour slide controller."