Smoking Moon is a thirteen minute black and white film. Like a creature from the ocean depths, an ancient crescent moon hangs in a black void smoking a cigarette. Smoking Moon is at once an illusion, a trick with light, a self portrait and a recording of a performance. This charming and witty film is desperately sad yet funny; lonely yet affecting.
David Austen is an artist whose work moves between abstraction and figuration. He makes watercolours of tiny figures; careful paintings of trees, texts and stars, and more recently constructions of wire, card and plaster. Often unashamedly nostalgic, his work speaks of fragility and longing. Using 16mm film for the first time, at Camden Arts Centre Austen presents Smoking Moon – the first in a series of films he intends to make.