Edinburgh Napier University

  HD Video, Silent, Black and White. Duration: 22 minutes.

To make this video artwork, the faces of jazz guitarist and composer Haftor Medbøe's quartet were filmed in extreme close-up, as they rehearsed for a performance at the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival.

This study of the musicians’ facial tics and tells as they navigate the half-rehearsed landscape of a jazz set is partly a portrait of Medbøe's band, and partly an investigation of the creative process.

In the course of a four song set, the unflinching gaze of the cameras give a tantalising glimpse of the agonies and triumphs of creative inspiration, edited into a mute video installation that unfolds in real time.

The absence of sound, and of the instruments themselves in the image, creates an isolated and abstract depiction of creativity in the raw.

The finished film screens in a loop on a floor-mounted CRT monitor.

The work showed as part of "Outside the Box', Paul Holmes's solo show, at Studio 21, Kolkata, June 2015; at the Jazzfest, Dalhousie Institute, Kolkata in November 2015; at the Royal Scottish Academy Open Exhibition in Edinburgh November 2015 - February 2016; and at TMU and Miraikan the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, Tokyo in April 2016.