Tide Line

This video beachscape is rooted in the observation of nature filtered through modern art. Chris Welsby acknowledges the native landscape tradition back to Constable, the first "technologies of vision" in the time-lapse photography of Muybridge, Cezanne's shifting viewpoint and Monet's serial paintings of the changing light.

When he was an art student in the 1970s, the landscape genre — his first subject as a painter — was radicalised by artists like Hamish Fulton, Richard Long and Keith Arnatt. Walking, hole-digging, marking and documenting soon replaced painterly interpretation.

In his first landscape films, made in this broad context of systems and concept art, Chris Welsby allowed the camera to see for itself rather than to substitute for the human eye. In Seven Days (1974), made in the Welsh mountains, the camera is mounted on a scientific tripod which tracks the rotation of the earth so that alternating images of sky and earth are energised by this circular motion. In the Windvane series (1972-8) the camera is wind-powered ( a very ecological metaphor!) while in Estuary (1980) the images are determined by the motion of a boat and by sampling exposures from dawn to dusk over three weeks.

As with systems painting, the films were structured in advance. He chose a place, such as a busy pathway in Park Film (1973) or a beach as in Fforest Bay (1973), and exposed a fixed number of frames over a day or longer from dawn to dusk.

Painstakingly filmed one frame at a time over days or even weeks, the films themselves are revelatory. Previously unseen patterns emerge from the jerky movements of people crossing the park, in sun and rain, while the changes of light in sky and in water are heightened and almost dramatized by time-lapse shooting. The drama is by chance and incidental, the key thing is to record the passage of time in the medium of film.

Encouraged by Anne Rees-Mogg at Chelsea School of Art, Chris Welsby joined other young artists in the first distinctively British film avant-garde at the London Film Makers' Cooperative, The Co-op fused the underground spirit of experimentation with the basic "hands-on" equipment to film, print and project directly. Film-making began to look like one of the modernist art forms, closer to painting, sculpture and print-making than to conventional cinema or television. Chris Welsby shared the fine art ethos more than most, but unusually for a Co-op filmmaker he did not manipulate or even edit the print. Editing, in his view, smacked of the film industry. Decisions about light, shape and structure were made whilst exposing the film. The print is a direct copy from this original. Video was later to be even simpler — there is no original. Only the two-minute overlaid print of Colour Separation (1975) comes close to the hand-made look of a Co-op film but its primary purpose is to reveal the colour process rather than to make abstract cinema

Similarly, his "expanded" films on two, three or six screens approach the scale of cinema but are set firmly in the gallery rather than the auditorium. In Shore Line II (1979), a predecessor of the work shown here, short repeated loops of the seashore are simultaneously seen across six screens. But the illusion of cinemascope is quickly checked by the sequence of shots, by the projectors on their sides in vertical format and by the loops hanging visibly from the ceiling. The single screen Estuary is exhibited in the same space as panel displays of satellite photos, frame enlargements, aerial shots,weather maps, notebooks and topographical charts, so that the spectator pieces the work together in its moving context.

Welsby has moved even further from conventional screen space as shown in this installation and a variety of works in which the viewer looks down — rather than across — to see the film or videos played on floor-mounted screens. These ideas first appeared in the l980s (when Welsby was teaching film at the Slade and drawing at the Central Schools of Art) as a more troubled response to contemporary landscape imaging. The impact of Chernobyl and other disasters lay hidden in the clouds. Sky Light (1988) was a multi-screen installation of a stormy sky, in which fragmented flash-frames break up the flow of images in a metaphor of vision as violent interruption. In Welsby's only montage video to date, and his most emblematic, Sea Pictures (1992), a child builds a sandcastle whilst fragmented urban and TV clips act as images of alienation. Also made after he moved to Canada in 1989, Drift (1994) is a distillation of his ideas even as it clears the ground for new ones. Filmed in near-darkness, ghost-like boats move slowly across a bare harbour.

Welsby's new video installations return to colour and contemplation. The camera captures change in time and tide, in contrast to the mainstream video-culture of surveillance and domination. Twenty-five years ago, when he made his first projections for large spaces, film and art rarely met in the gallery; now it is common and installation art is a distinct practice.

Younger artists such as Tacita Dean echo Welsby's concerns for landscape, light and documentation (her recent film of the 1999 eclipse, Banewl was commissioned by St Ives International), although in an overtly romantic style. More distant still are the "great machines" of Jeff Wall or Bill Viola, which emphasize video and photography as colour spectacle. Welsby prefers the viewers' associations to grow out of the work rather than to be imposed by the maker. In this, his work joins a wider tradition of modernist landscape, exemplified by such St Ives painters as Peter Lanyon who saw space from a new angle and gave it an image.

Written by Al Rees, Senior Research Fellow, Royal College of Art, London and author of A History of Experimental Film and Video, BFI Publishing, London, 1999.