Landscape-based Research (2022-ongoing)
I have borrowed the term “landscape-based” for my doctoral research practice from friend and fellow collage-making filmmaker, Rose Ferraby, who uses a landscape-based approach to explore narratives of change at a human and environmental scale (Ferraby 2015). Like Rose, I am interested in how methods of recording the landscape can tell different stories and perspectives. I am also interested in how artistic experiments can get left in the filmmaking process and remain as a sort of moving and changing archive (or non-archive), much like the fluid shifting landscape according to Barbara Bender (2002). To give an example, here are some ideas I am currently working on:
Scanned 16mm film fragments on digital film still: originally discarded tests for the B/W chemistry used to develop Green Lane, Bodelva (2022)
Assembled Landscapes: Wembury (2022)
A film made as part of a collaborative research project with Dr Laura Hodsdon, commissioned by the Landscape Research Group.
I wrote a paper about the filmmaking and research process for the LRG’s multimedia platform, Landscape Exchange, here.
Assembled Landscapes: Wembury (2022), 6 minute video.
Moving Landscapes (2021)
In 2020, two years into my practice-based PhD, I partnered with Grays Wharf in Penryn to co-produce a research project involving artists and participants from Sensory Trust. The resulting work was exhibited at Grays Wharf for four weeks in July, 2021.
Moving Landscapes commissioned three artists, Kitty Hillier, Rosanna Martin and Oliver Raymond-Barker, to record walks in the landscape. Following a set of instructions that I put together, and followed myself, we produced materials for a rich creative resource (activity packs) to be sent to Sensory Trust participants, who in turn created their own responses to the landscape (in the form of drawings, photography, collage and sculpture). In addition, the artists – a painter, ceramicist, photographer and filmmaker – made new work in response to these walks. Throughout this process, the artists and participants kept in touch to discuss and exchange creative ideas through a series of conversations online, over the phone and via the post.
Animation of the packs for Sensory Trust participants
I made two films for the exhibition. 1. in response to my own instructions, revealing collaged audiovisual artefacts from the walk (Carn Marth walk below), and 2. a visualised response to all material collected (fieldwork from artists and engagement with participants), revealing the layers of connection and interpretation of an embodied experience of the Cornish landscape (Experiments in Engagement). Film 3 (below) is a short documentary about the project featuring interviews with participants.
Cornish landscape, documenting, land, material objects, collage, place, fieldwork, experimental film.
Carn Marth Walk (2021), 5 minute looped video collage (digitised 16mm film and laser prints).
Experiments in Engagement (2021), 8 minute looped video.
Moving Landscapes documentary (2021).
Extracts from earlier work, including Land Documents (2019) and Land Studies (2020).
Land Studies (2020), 3 minute video or “moving sketch book”. Installed at Grays Wharf’s summer show 2020.
Land Documents (2019), 5 minute looped video.
Land Documents installed at Grays Wharf for the group exhibition Borrowed Images: The Landscape Library, 26 Oct - 23 Nov 2019.
