Primarily a filmmaker, James Edmonds studied painting at the University of Brighton where he first began to experiment with these parallel strands of his practice, as well as exploring sound and DIY musical forms. His work is driven by a personal poetics in which the act of recording the everyday becomes both a materialist, formal structure and a highly subjective experiential reality in itself - a complex synthesis of presence and memory. In his films, the work begins in the camera: the formation of each shot implying its own immediate cinematic resonance, the resulting sequence of film material treated as its own physical entity. Likewise, in his paintings, the formal properties become a centre of documentation of their own becoming, as well as evidence of the human hand and the inner gesture.

His films have been shown at various international festivals including Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look, Curtas Vila do Conde, Open City London, and EXiS Seoul. Solo presentations have taken place at (S8) A Coruña, Experimental Filmtage Frankfurt, Cinéma Parenthèse Brussels, Nocturnal Reflections Milan and Ausland Berlin.

He occasionally contributes texts, teaches workshops in art and filmmaking, and has organised various screenings and events including the film series Light Movement (2015-2018) and has collaborated with Petra Graf on the Grass Harp exhibition series (2016-present). He lives and works in Berlin, Germany and continues to document the light