“A Frog Sits In Water” began as a poem and now sits at the center of Dylan Friese-Greene’s practice. The film is a short experimental study of complacency during an all-consuming heatwave, following a solitary man as his mind frays and the world boils around him. The saxophone of Gal Go and the voice of Kojaque thread music and narration through the images so that sound and picture make the same claim.
Dylan’s approach is built on a simple idea that texture tells you what you need to know. He builds with lo-fi craft, hands-on animation, and precise editing so frames feel materially present. Grain, glue, and handcrafted effects are not accidents; they record labor and presence. That visible process keeps the human inside the image and gives the work its quiet insistence.
His collaborations with Jordan Rakei, Lucy Rose, and Kojaque refine distinct visual identities while preserving evocative detail. Dylan’s moving-image installations alongside artists such as Sián Davey have occupied Soho Photography Quarter, turning screenings into communal events where the work is experienced collectively. Those public moments extend the films beyond private viewing into shared practice.
“A Frog Sits In Water” presents a simple yet persistent image that captures a complex idea, turning the image of a frog in boiling water into a symbol of complacency. The frog’s quiet endurance mirrors our own gradual acceptance of decline, as minor failures accumulate until they solidify into catastrophe. The film translates that slowness into texture and pacing so the viewer experiences incremental change the way a body does, through accumulated discomfort rather than a single shock.
That accumulation is political. Small policy shifts, gradual erosion of public services, and the steady normalization of surveillance add up because each step is survivable on its own. The film treats those steps like frames in a sequence: each one is legible and therefore accountable, and together they form a trajectory. By drawing attention to the intervals, the work refuses spectacle and instead asks for a different kind of attention, the kind that notices the seams before they tear.
Ecological calamity is in the literal heat. A slowly-rising temperature is the most patient form of violence, one that asks societies to reorganize or to accept loss in instalments. The film places biological fragility next to human negligence so that the heat feels like civic failure as much as weather. That alignment makes the environmental question immediate: when the slow change arrives, we will either have built systems to adapt or we will have been taught to accept decline. The frog metaphor clarifies that responsibility lives in the choices that are easy to make and hard to reverse. The film warns us that if we only act when the water boils, we’ve already surrendered to it. Indifference must be cured in life.
Just like the heatwave, the rising pressure is choking, oppressive, and, to an extent, paralyzing. The value of “A Frog Sits In Water” is practical, as it converts a familiar parable into a tool for seeing. The film asks viewers to challenge passivity; to catalog small changes, and to name them precisely. Doing that work is how continuity and belonging defend against slide. The frog is an instruction to notice, to act in increments, and to treat slow harm the way you would any unfolding craft problem: with attention, language, and steady collaboration.
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