WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > NYMPHAEA AETERNUM

HERITAGE HUB
THURSDAY 2 – SUNDAY 5 MAY
10:00 – 17:00 / 100′ (looped)

FREE ENTRY

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

Water lilies forever! Richard Forbes-Hamilton’s Nymphaea Aeternum is a single-channel digital animation of the artist’s own water lily oil paintings. Encompassing 72,000 frames – no two of which are the same – across 100 minutes, the film ends where it begins so that it doesn’t end at all. In the context of this looped exhibition, the work continues seemingly ad infinitum: a fittingly durational monument to the plant to which Claude Monet dedicated 250 paintings over the course of his final three decades. 

It’s the later Monet paintings, which flattened perspective by closing in on the water to deny sight or clue of its perimeter, that this film’s similarly abstract perspective most resembles. Forbes-Hamilton’s animation approximates a never-not-evolving sense of motion, be it that of objects moving through a frame – as if the image-recording device is merely witness to what film scholars call the contingent motion of early cinema – or that of the image-recording device itself physically in transit. Indeed, are the water lilies perpetually floating towards us here, disappearing out the bottom of the frame as others creep into view from the top, or is it that we are moving toward them, as if across an impossibly vast pond? 

Either way, Nymphaea Aeternum provides an uncannily familiar sense of cinematic perspective. It is for this reason that water, which behaves and goes where it pleases, is such a dynamic vector: years before his own panoramic murals and circular canvases attempted to transcend the established limits of perception, in dramatic works like The Green Wave (1866) and even in the gentle laps of Le Grenouillére (1896), Monet understood that water intrinsically alludes to a world beyond the rectangular frame. 

This is an optical tension: a dynamic that in Nymphaea Aeternum is heightened by the film’s other interplays. Firstly, there is the film’s play on absence and presence, the way it is about the reflections of an ever-morphing sky, evoked so richly in the water surface between the eponymous nymphaea, as much as it is the plants themselves. Second, there is the soundscape, Forbes-Hamilton’s own, an invitingly minimal drone that provides no armature for understanding: it is its own painfully beautiful recurrent motif that is, like water, without start or finish.