Private Project

Chalk Compass

Chalk Compass traces a woman’s passage through luminous thresholds: house, studio, garden, road, windows, stairwells, pools, sea walls - where the body becomes vessel and compass. Her gestures shift between embrace, contortion and supplication, while chalk circles inscribe paths of protection, navigation and return.

Fire consumes, smoke rises, sand, trees, the sea, mountains and temples surround her. Each element is a symbol of transmutation and renewal. The ritualistic repetition of chalk boundaries, both as sacred spaces and portals, is used to enact both conscious permeability and spiritual or archetypal alignment.

Presences, movements and marks are often made along the edges of the frame, perhaps testing constraints and realms of reference. Accompanying the Compass are a black cat and a century-old Cassandra who punctuates the three acts in portentous, ad libitum rhyming couplets.

Echoing a vision of the natural world as mirror to the spiritual and William Blake’s pathognomy of the symbolic body, the film unfolds as a meditation on alchemy, cycles and the fragile crossings between inner and outer, light and shadow.

Chalk Compass is a video performance artist film. It is edited in the Terza Rima form in a nod to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Filmed entirely DIY, on a smartphone, on location in Margate, Venice, Lake Garda, Delphi and Athens. 
With thanks to the artist’s grandmother Carmela Cavaliere Tonin, who spontaneously gifted her verses to camera.

  • Chiara Williams
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short, Other
  • Genres:
    Art, Performance, Video Art, Video Performance, Video Poetry, Art Film, Artist Film, DIY Film, Movement, Dance, Smartphone, Experimental, Short
  • Runtime:
    18 minutes 24 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    September 19, 2025
  • Production Budget:
    0 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Italy, United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    Greece, Italy, United Kingdom
  • Language:
    English, Italian
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital, smartphone
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Chiara Williams

Chiara Williams is a British-Italian artist based in Margate, UK. Williams holds a BFA and MFA from the University of Oxford, The Ruskin School of Fine Art, and an MA in Audio-Visual Production from London Metropolitan University.

Her practice spans installation, performance, video, sculpture, painting and writing, exploring the body as vessel and instrument in dialogue with elemental forces. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including at the 53rd & 54th Venice Biennales. 

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Director Statement

I work with space, light and material to create environments that simultaneously embody a state of transience and fixedness - spaces that invite a pause, a shifting of attention. My installations, moving image works, paintings and texts are connected by a shared concern with perception: how we frame the world, what we miss in passing, and how light and shadow, structure and time can quietly unsettle our sense of where and who we are.

The work often begins with found spatial conditions - architectural voids, overlooked surfaces - in which I subtly intervene using elemental, ephemeral and found materials: fabric, mirror, stone, photographs, pigment, food, scent.

Many of these elements are drawn from domestic contexts, yet are slightly estranged from their original function - imbued with a quiet uncanniness. Their impermanence registers on an olfactory or metabolic level as much as a visual one.

There’s an undercurrent of the cinematic in what I do, though the work resists narrative. Rather than illustrating an idea, my films and installations create a spatial, temporal, and sensorial situation within which something quieter can occur.

Painting and writing remain integral studio practices - ways of holding a thought, mood, or rhythm with visceral charge. Ultimately, I’m drawn to forms that feel both precise and open-ended - minimal in gesture but rich in sensation.

My work avoids spectacle in favour of resonance: the kind that lingers quietly, embedded in the body’s memory. It does not seek to impose meaning, but to make space for it.