Ellie Epp

Five Films by Ellie Epp streams on Ultra Dogme until the end of September 1.

trapline (1976)

The opening shot of trapline, which was taken in West London's Silchester Baths by Canadian artist Ellie Epp, is the variety of shot I could lose hours to: water as a mirror and a mirage. The image is not symmetrical, yet it has a geometric harmony and what I would call "folding points," where the rigour of the composition encloses strong structural lines that incline the mind toward balance - we want to turn the image on its corners and beams with our eyes, to find new ways of conceiving the space. The duration of the shot, and its stillness, creates desire: this must be how an origamist feels, waiting patiently for his meal to arrive as he eyes up the potential of the napkin. Even before the waters are disrupted, Epp's composition jumbles our senses, or what our senses want.

As Merleau-Ponty writes in The Phenomenology of Perception, 

"The form of a fold in linen or cotton shows us the resilience or dryness of the fibre, the coldness or warmth of the material. … One sees the weight of a block of cast iron which sinks in the sand, the fluidity of water and the viscosity of syrup."

The fascination of trapline is that multiple elements, textures, and weights are contained in the same shot - does the scaffold bar feel "heavy" as it's reflected in water? It's not actually interacting with the water, yet it impacts the water's surface. When ripples appear in the pool, they seem to appear along the bar's supporting line, but in reality they can't; again, impacting rather than interacting with the object's form. Maybe I'm just hyper-sensitive to this kind of image-making, but I feel incredibly excited by this possibility.

The appearance of the ripples release an underlying tension in the image - a tension that only exists because we expect the image to be disturbed by ripples at some point. Our eye no longer has one fixed line to settle on, and so the brief flickers of a figure - the ghost of a lifeguard, perhaps - in the right corner, near the reflection of the building, disappears altogether when the ripples appear. There's no such figure, of course - only my eye making form out of the gaps in space. But I want him to be there. A shy ghost guard, unsettled by the sudden suggestion of human forms.