Shell Company was established by Seth Pimlott and Pearl Doughty-White as a platform for experiments in collaborative moving-image practice.
The company is an umbrella under which a changing cast of collaborators can assemble, an approach that attempts to address the complexities of group work and disseminated authorship.
Our projects are participatory and based on long-term relationships with artists and groups: they are filmic portraits, often developed through a workshop process, where we attempt to hold the individual in tension with the collective. The resulting films are both lyrical and narrative, and often involve experiments with 16mm in-camera collage and optical printing in order to bring images together poetically in a way that also leaves room for chance, seeing something meaningful in their physical entanglement in the chemical substrates of film. A focus on layering and depth, both stylistically and technically, initiates a dialogue between the twin realities of our interior and exterior worlds.
We think of filmmaking as an apparatus that can bring communities into being, that can have action on the world through its processes as well as its outcomes, and are interested in using it as a tool to articulate the systems that give rise to the phenomena we encounter together.
Shell Company aims to co-create social and imaginary spaces in which new modes of participatory art-making may emerge; art that is precious, polyvocal and of mysterious genesis.