Film / Video
Denise Hawrysio’s work in film and video is rooted in the structuralist tradition, developed while studying at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1980s with Janis Crystal Lipzin, Gunvor Nelson, and Larry Jordan. Her early practice was often situated within the then-emerging field of installation, frequently integrating moving image with print to explore the physical and sensory dimensions of the medium.
A defining characteristic of Hawrysio’s filmwork is the subversion of traditional perspective. In Film Art Phenomena, Nicky Hamlyn notes that in her work, “the camera assumes the ‘impossible’ point of view”, pinpointing the distinct gap between “camera vision and human vision”. This is most evident in her 1980s series of tool-mounted Super-8 films, where the camera — fixed to shovels or jackhammers — captures a raw choreography of manual labour. In these works, the visual outcome is dictated by the mechanical process itself, a methodology that mirrors her print practice of allowing etching plates to be marked by the movements and chance events of the world.
Her recent video works continue this investigation into the limits of visibility and the mechanics of perception. Through the use of visual feedback, binocular lenses, and long-standing collaborations with sound artists, Hawrysio explores an expanded territory of the visible. Moving between abstraction and documentation, these films use radically discontinuous imagery to investigate concepts of disappearance, impermanence, and the sensory dimensions of the psychological landscape.
Gaps in the Persistent Hiss
Experiments in Cinema Film Festival, New Mexico, USA, 2021
Gaps in the Persistent Hiss is a journey through a landscape both sonically and visually. Through the combination of experimental music and a handheld binocular lens, the video plays with a radically discontinuous almost hallucinogenic image which reveals a primordial awareness of the world around us. At times through this binocular lens, the image acts as a sort of mirror expanding the territory of the visible beyond what the individual can directly experience, by reflecting what is behind the lens, then suddenly acts as a sort of hole sucking up the entire visual world into itself.
Linescio
Strangelove Film Festival, UK, 2020
Studio 8 Film Festival, San Francisco, 2025
Linescio, like Hawrysio’s early film work, consists of sequential experiments investigating links between movement, place and sound, moving in and out of abstraction. Building on the insights of experimental and structural film, this work puts the emphasis on materials, processes, and chance in order to explore concepts of disappearance and impermanence. Made during an informal residency in the Swiss Alps during the Covid summer of 2020, the soundtrack is a mix of sound artist John Wynne’s work with pan-European avant-garde music group Bouche Bée (John Eyles, Petri Huurinainen, and Emmanuelle Waeckerlé).
Landscape Lens Study
Landscape Lens Study exploits the specificities of time and technology, in the spirit of Dziga Vertov’s 1920 film Man with a Movie Camera, wherein a series of fragments builds into a portrait of landscape and the sensory, psychological, and social dimensions of a virtual world.
Relaxation and Nothingness
MOCA, London, 2020 / 21
Having previously experimented with infinite camera/projector loops, this work explores the “tautological elegance” of visual feedback. Originally performed as a live Zoom intervention during the Covid lockdown for MOCA London using only the ambient sound of her studio, Hawrysio later invited sound artist John Wynne to add a soundtrack. Like much of Hawrysio’s work, the intention is to abstract from the visible world in order to transform the viewer’s perceptions of “normal” reality.
Asphalt Cooker aka Tar Kettle
Pandemonium Biennial of Moving Image, Lux, London, 2003
Analogue & Digital, Fieldgate, London, 2007
Transcentric, Lethaby Gallery, London, 2008
“In Jackhammer, Snow Shovel and Tar Kettle, the camera is fixed to the handles of those objects in such a way that the object to which the camera is attached extends into the scene…. Because the framing is tight and the subject vibrating we have no reliable clues to guide our reading of the films. Furthermore, snow may fill the frame, steam from the boiling tar obscure the field of vision or lumps of tarmac move and detach themselves from the road as if animated by hand. The difference between camera vision and human vision is pinpointed. The camera gets in between ourselves and our technology.”
Nicky Hamlyn, Film Art Phenomena
Shovel aka Push and Shove
Pandemonium Biennial of Moving Image, Lux, London, 2003
Lux Open, London, 2003
Analogue & Digital, Fieldgate, London, 2007
Transcentric, Lethaby Gallery, London, 2008
This work is one in a series of films made by Hawrysio in the 1980s by attaching a Super-8 camera to various machines or tools: the visual content of each film is determined solely by the events and actions of the context in which it was made; the duration of each film is determined by the length of one Super-8 cartridge, with no editing outside the camera. Here, the camera was mounted on a long-handled shovel.
The soundtrack — also unedited — is from a cassette tape bought from a street vendor in New York City for 25¢ by Wynne. On the tape was a series of phone calls between two men whose interactions are characterised by a remarkably idiosyncratic use of expletives aimed at each other. John acquired the tape in the 80s but didn't add it to the previously silent film until it was digitised in 2003.
Jackhammer
Pandemonium Biennial of Moving Image, Lux, London, 2003
Seoul Festival of Super 8 Experimental Film, 2003
An invitation was made to a worker on the street in London to participate in the making of a film, and a Super-8 camera was attached to his jackhammer. The duration is determined by the length of one Super-8 cartridge, with no editing outside the camera.
Snowplow
A Super-8 camera is attached to a snow plow in Toronto. The sound was recorded in an Irish country and western bar in Kingston, Ontario by John Wynne.
329 Main Street
Lux Open, London, 2003
This was shot on Super-8 film in the artist’s father’s house in Woodstock, Ontario, during a time when he was in declining health and was increasingly housebound. It simply records the process of looking out from every window in the house, embodying a place and time through movement and sound, the camera engaging poetically as a sort of witness. The soundtrack, added in 2002, is taken from Panic and Depression, an electroacoustic composition for violin and tape composed by John Wynne, with Aleks Kolkowski, violin.
Character Actresses A–K and Leading Actors N–Z
Matt’s Gallery, London
Camberwell College of Arts, London
This pair of videos is a direct extension of the two altered artist books of the same title, which form the foundation of Denise Hawrysio’s Spotlight project. To create the original volumes, the Spotlight directories were meticulously incised with a scalpel to remove every actor’s portrait, leaving a sequence of sculptural voids. Readers Eleanor Vonne Brown and William English navigate the fragmented names revealed through these apertures, transforming the directory’s utilitarian data into a staccato, rhythmic litany. The performance evokes the sound poetry of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, in which language is stripped of its primary function and reduced to its abstract parts.