Atkins, Ed
Ed Atkins’ 'Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths' is a follow-up to his pilot project, 'Material Witness (or A Liquid Cop)'. Here, Atkins’ shifty, protean protagonist is not so much undercover as in too deep – his identity hidden; his body immersed and submerged. Sleeping with the fishes in his luminescent vacuum at the bottom of the ocean, he is the unquiet voice of the repressed, the face of the unfathomable (albeit a face that is framed and sometimes lost behind its mass of tangled, swirling hair). Netted by digital motion capture techniques and embellished through computer animation, the slipperiness of truth and the difficulty of its representation are vividly entwined in this image, lending Atkins’ investigations a material, almost forensic resonance. Animators speak of the rendering of hair as the final frontier (and the elusive grail) of computer graphic verisimilitude. Get it right and your character is immediately believable. Get it wrong and it is an instant, incriminating giveaway. Atkins’ figure drifts deliberately between the two: fitfully surfacing like a nagging subconscious memory, a foreign body floating up from the depths. As with all of Atkins’ work, however, that frisson of indeterminacy lingers indelibly, haunting and troubling the mind.
- Artwork Details: running time: 12 minutes 51seconds
- Edition: Hors de Commerce in an edition of 5 + 2AP
- Material description: single screen HD projections with 5:1 sound
- Credit line: © the artist. Commissioned by Jerwood Visual Arts and Film and Video Umbrella for the Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Awards. With support from Arts Council England. Extracts of 'The Morning Roundup' by Gilbert Sorrentino used with permission from and thanks to Christopher Sorrentino.
- Theme: Figurative
- Medium: Film and Audio Visual
- Accession number: ACC2/2013