Artist’s Statement

“My practice explores the changing nature of cinematic materiality with a particular focus on
merging the dynamic forms of cinema with the traditions of painting and sculpture.”
Burford's practice covers a number of interlinked areas, with particular focus on information
aggregation and the crystallization of the transient domain. He is fascinated by film, more
specifically the process of watching images on a screen and the way our eyes read different
colour and light.
As cinema becomes increasingly digital and dematerialised in its method of production,
content and delivery, there is a consequent drive to return to its material roots in the
physical world. Working with a variety of media - 3D printing, painting, video and time-lapse
photography - Burford restructures traditional cinematic forms to create new synthetic
compositions that describe four-dimensional Space- time.
Many of the works start with the tracing of cinematic time; using customized handmade
cameras constructed by the artist. The artist uses these to trace long durational exposures
of time through the production of temporal maps. Burford effectively crafts a cinematic
score. The flowing bands of colour and abrupt changes in the photographic traces bear a
direct indexical relation to the original cinematic material.
The images are the starting point for a series of artistic investigations into the material nature
of cinematic memory - combining the use of physical film with modern digital manufacturing
processes - a combination which echoes cinema’s analogue past history and its present
digital hybridity.

If cinema is thought fast he‘flattening’of real physical objects from the actual physical world, to
be seen at a later stage (where the experience of time is technically structured and inherently
generic) these art works represent a gesture of returning; an attempt to introduce
materiality, physicality and a natural temporality to film.