Direct animation that intertwines – 'purls' together – two equal lengths of 16mm film. Purl is the term for a stitch in hand-knitting made by putting the needle through the front of the stitch from right to left; purl also means a swirling stream of water. On the strip of clear leader, coloured abstractions are hand-painted and overprinted with dyes; The second strip uses a photogram technique to bleach abstract shapes and marks into the emulsion of black leader, then selected frames are engraved and overlaid with adhesive Lettraset letters, numbers and diacritics. The percussion of an original sound composition derived from audio field recordings performs a counterpoint to the flow of visual music, as the pair of film strips interweave and superimpose.

Purling foregrounds the materiality of 'analogue’ film. The digitally scanned 'frame' shows the entire width of the 16mm strip, including the sprocket holes, as well as a section of each preceding and successive frame. Also visible are the incidental marks of hand-painting and printing, such as tiny specks of fluff, airborne débris, scratches and fingerprints, and the frame-by-frame notation between each sprocket hole that guides the choreography and ‘beat’ of the visuals.