Folding Time

Setting up a conversation with London-based film artist Sarah Pucill turned out to be a nonlinear process. After a few attempts to align our schedules, we finally connected through Zoom, in two calls spaced a week apart. The first meeting was cut short, so in the second we retraced what had already been said—an apt reflection of the recursive, layered nature of Pucill’s work. Over the last thirty years, her films have shown a sustained engagement with feminist politics, surrealist aesthetics, and the material language of cinema. Our conversation mirrored her creative approach: circling back, repeating, building, and reframing rather than moving straight ahead.

Pucill fittingly describes how her work unfolds in phases that are rarely linear, but never arbitrary. “There are periods where things shift, yet themes recur and the formal strategies have a consistent internal logic.” As such, her films are connected by a visual and conceptual vocabulary that keeps evolving over time. Figures, motifs, and techniques reemerge—altered, recontextualised, but recognisable. This principle of continuity, of ideas rippling across decades, is key to understanding how the artist’s work coheres, drawing strength from its self-reflection.

A similar vigor runs through Backcomb, though in a more discordant register. Here, a woman’s hair—wiry, wild, and uncontrolled—dominates the screen, dragging across a fully set table and ensnaring everything in its path. “Yes, Medusa,” Pucill confirms when I mention the myth. “All of that is there.” The figure of the witch, another symbol of feminine unruliness, also looms large. Just as witches let their hair grow wild to repel men, the hair in Backcomb becomes a symbol of resistance: it disrupts the domestic order and evokes a force that refuses containment. This sense of unruliness also carries over into the film’s sound design. In continuity with her earlier works, Backcomb plays with a dissonance between image and sound. But here, toward the end of the film, the sound drops out entirely—an abrupt silence that does not feel like an absence. It is more of a release. “A kind of freedom, maybe,” Pucill adds. As in Swollen Stigma, the film insists that what is often coded as passive is, in fact, full of agency.

Yet, these films carry a haunting undercurrent. Interwoven throughout is the shadow of anorexia, a struggle Pucill’s partner Lahire faced for years. A complex interplay between celebration and fear clouds the atmosphere. Lahire’s illness, Pucill’s fear of losing her, and broader reflections on intimacy all inform the work. “It ties to ideas of desire and deprivation,” she says. “Can you eat? Can you accept pleasure?” These questions are deeply personal, but also political. “If the female body is always the object of desire, then where is her own desire?”

Pucill’s later films, particularly Stages of Mourning (2004) and Double Exposure (2023), further explore the interrogation of pleasure and refusal, presence and absence, both made after Lahire’s passing in 2001. In Stages of Mourning, Pucill turns the camera on herself as she moves through the once-shared domestic space and interacts with photographs of her lost partner. Unlike her earlier surrealist tableaux, this film adopts a more raw and observational mode. “I simply turned the camera on and let things unfold.” The effect is intimate, unadorned, and quietly devastating. Double Exposure, made almost two decades later, revisits this loss. Using archival photographs of herself and Lahire, Pucill steps inside projected images, bridging the temporal gap between past and present. The film performs a radical act of re-inhabitation, reviving the visual traces and emotional imprints of memory. “I’ve come back again and again to this relationship between myself, the camera, the space—the internal and the external,” she says. These works don’t simply process grief; through haunting returns and recursive gestures, they bend and fold time, refusing its linearity.

This commitment to return also shapes how Pucill’s films relate to one another over time. Earlier themes or techniques are re-entered and reworked, as seen in Eye Cut (2021). The film not only picks up the threads of superimposition and feminist politics with renewed urgency, but also recalls the tabletop settings of her earliest work—especially You Be Mother, which helped determine the direction of much that followed. A surrealist journey, the film features a woman in a nude bodysuit performing inside a cardboard box that acts as both costume and miniature theatre. She carries out symbolic, sometimes grotesque acts such as cutting pieces from a cake placed on her torso to reveal a saturated red beneath the nude-coloured icing—transforming it into a visceral extension of her body. This macabre rewriting of traditional magic acts evokes the violent consumption of women’s bodies, internalised over time and eventually self-inflicted.

The work connects to the MeToo movement through cut-out newspaper texts about abuse cast across the protagonist’s domestic space, echoing Pucill’s earlier use of superimposition. Newspaper headlines referencing sexual violence are cast across intimate interiors, underscoring the inescapability of trauma. As Pucill explains, “there is a silence around these subjects, which is why I am doing it. It is as Gisele Pelicot says: ‘shame has to change sides.’” Although the protagonist in Eye Cut never speaks in her own words, the film remains a visceral testament to the struggle to speak out and break the silence.

Pucill’s current film-in-progress returns to the theme of speaking out within the living room of her childhood. Using 16mm outtakes as in Double Exposure—then of her late partner, now of her mother—the film blends archival with new material to examine long-silenced family secrets surrounding ECT and alcoholism, a story Pucill stresses is far from atypical. “Her refusal to speak became my incapacity to speak,” she reflects on her mother. Yet the film does not aim to assign blame; rather, it seeks to give voice to what was once unspeakable. Drawing on long-standing feminist convictions, Pucill insists: “This is not just a personal problem. It is a structural issue and deeply political.”

In discussing how to address political themes in film, Pucill stresses the importance of an aesthetic approach. Form is inseparable from politics: “If a supposedly feminist film doesn’t challenge conventions or aesthetics, there’s really nothing to celebrate.” The artist consciously rejects Hollywood’s cinematic smoothness—its polish, its narrative cohesion—in favour of a tactile, “handmarked quality.” Her films are deliberately rough-edged: textures remain visible, edits disrupt rather than soothe, and image and sound often move out of sync. In doing so, she offers a cinema that resists assimilation and insists on its own politics of looking.

What’s striking about Pucill’s films is that despite this roughness, there’s a strong sense of precision and intent. Every frame feels exactly in its place. As our conversation passes the 90-minute mark, I ask how much intuition shapes her process. “Oh, it is definitely there,” she says, only to quickly clarify that a strong commitment to shape and composition balances it. Pucill’s background in painting continues to guide her as she constructs her sets and images from scratch. “I don’t just go and find images,” she says. “I create them.”