WINNER - Rookwood Short Films Award
Last Sentences (2019)
05:16 min
Last sentences brings together snippets and outtakes of years’ worth of projects and lost last sentences from numerous texts collaged with a small moment of footage of a snow storm, captured from the window of the apartment where my late collaborator Jürgen and I were living in during our student exchange to France in 2008.
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” (James Joyce, The Dead, last sentence)
About the Artist
Elise Harmsen was born on Whadjuk Nyoongar Country, in Perth WA and now lives on Gadigal Wangal Country in Sydney’s inner west. She explores the nuances of digital images by examining their relationships to memory, time, and space. By focusing on the illusion of the frozen frame of the celluloid strip, Elise engages with the heavy presence of passing time and mortality associated with the still image, moving back and forth within a few clicks. From 2006-12 Elise worked collaboratively with Jürgen Kerkovius, from 2014-18 Elise was a resident artist at Sydney based ARI 55 Sydenham Rd, and recently she has been working collaboratively with MP Hopkins.