Nicci Haynes is a visual artist based in Australia.

In the artist’s words: “I live in Canberra, Australia. At the moment I’m making mainly moving image work but my practice includes mad-scientist installations, print, drawing, and performance.

I made 'There and back’ using some paper printouts that I had available during lockdown with limited access to resources. I am the person in the images, which came from a video I made a while ago using my camera on a self-timer, hence the poor focus. Pacing back and forth across a room struck me as being apposite for our current situation: housebound and limited.

I have been trying to articulate to myself what it is that draws me to film*. I have a few thoughts about this: Film is like thought; it is a stream of ideas and a single finished fixed image rarely feels sufficient to capture what I wish to convey, whatever that may be. It also occurs to me the sequential revealing of film is text-like and text has a particular grip on me: Joyce, for instance, fascinates me for his peculiar language use, and Beckett also, with a linguistic style that someone described as ‘aphasic modernism’. I am also a printmaker, of etching mainly, and am never drawn to a final fixed version of plate, but to the ‘states’ of a plate that I continue to work; making a sequence of images over time, which equals film to my thinking. Another observation about my own films is that the process is always visible, and that feels important to me – more important than having the image in focus in this instance.

*I use the term ‘film’ but I rarely use film. I make sequences of images from drawings, sheets of paper, objects.”

Concept & Creation | Nicci Haynes
Curator of The Long Minute | Bronwyn Lace