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Tess Martin

Artist working across animation, installation, and expanded cinema

  • All projects
  • Research Areas
  • Commissions
  • About
  • News
  • Behind the Scenes
  • Writing & Context

Time as Material

“There isn’t a single time in the universe” - Carlo Rovelli.
This body of work examines time as something that is relative. Through animation and installation, temporal processes such as sequentiality, repetition, and duration become visible as material transformation. These works often explore expanded temporal scales (geological, cosmological, or generational) alongside lived experience, allowing different forms of time to coexist within shared space.

Memory, Trace, Place

These projects investigate how environments hold and transmit memory. Working with archives, domestic spaces, landscapes, and material remnants, the works explore how histories persist through fragments and how absence becomes perceptible through trace. The past (or a version of it) is visible all around us, if only we know how to look.

Animation as Reconstruction

Animation functions here as a method of revelation, a way of making visible what cannot be directly observed. Through processes of layering, erasure, and transformation, these works reconstruct lost histories, invisible temporal processes, or subjective perceptions, making present what cannot exist in the real world: the absent, the abstract, and the otherwise intangible.

Expanded Film Environments

These works extend moving image into spatial form. Film becomes distributed across environments through projection, sculptural elements, and, often, individually experienced sound. Viewers encounter images through physical movement and duration, so time is felt in the body as much as it is seen. The moving image is no longer confined to a frame but becomes something that can be navigated and inhabited.

Time as Material

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Memory, Trace, Place

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Animation as Reconstruction

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Expanded Film Environments

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