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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

This body of work examines time as something that can be shaped, layered, and physically encountered rather than abstractly measured. Through animation and installation, temporal processes such as accumulation, erosion, 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 perceptual 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. Memory is approached not as stable record but as something continuously reconstructed through attention, perception, and relation to place.

Animation as Reconstruction

Animation functions here as a method of inquiry — a way of constructing images of what cannot be directly observed. Through processes of layering, erasure, and transformation, these works reconstruct lost histories, invisible temporal processes, or unstable perceptual relationships. The image emerges gradually, revealing time as a generative force rather than a neutral backdrop.

Expanded Film Environments

These works extend moving image into spatial form. Film becomes distributed across environments through projection, sculptural elements, and individually experienced sound. Viewers encounter images through physical movement and duration, creating embodied temporal experiences. 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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