Photo by Adrian Malloch. “It’s crazy here,” says Vincent Ward, glancing around his St Lukes office, a scribbly whiteboard (“Script. Sam Neill.”) propped against one wall, paper everywhere. Ward was here and in the cavernous adjoining studio until late the previous night, editing the immersive three-screen “cinematic installation” at the heart of his exhibition, Palimpsest/Landscapes. “I have never put as much firepower and devoted as much time per square frame of film as I have for this fucking show.” Four years in the making, the exhibition blurs the line between painting and film: Ward painted directly onto his models, creating textures with chalk, plaster, clay and ink, before filming and photographing them. He transforms the human form into monumental landforms; flesh metamorphosises into deserts and reefs. Here, the body is rendered liminal by a shimmer of colour; there, water drips languidly from hair and onto skin. A muscled upper back segues into a cliff face, tectonic and alive. “It could be a new landscape, our bodies, as ephemeral as the elemental world we live in,” says Ward. “The exhibition explores things that are between worlds, capturing something you can’t quite put a name on.” He transforms the human form into monumental ...
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