Official Selection - Two Short Nights

                                 

What a great way to end the year: hearing that my moving image work - The Porous Body - has been selected for the Two Short Nights Film Festival , which takes place 5th-6th March next year.  

This experimental short explores the dark and claustrophobic world of the late 19th / early 20th century seance room -- from the point of view of a female medium. It is based on first-hand accounts by believers, sceptics and scientists.

Mediums aroused curiosity and suspicion in equal amounts. Often treated like scientific specimens, they were subjected to intrusive examinations and troubling experiments in order to demonstrate their integrity.

It's a tangled story of faith and rationality, the limited power that women held in a highly patriarchal society, and the Victorian obsession with pushing at the frontiers of scientific discovery.

The film's low-tech, low-budget aesthetic reflects the simple means by which these women conjured their manifestations of ectoplasm and other phenomena -- as well as the still-evolving technology that was used to record and comprehend them.

Gathering and sowing (the seeds of a work)

RANGE | Work in progress | 2025

 

Making work about Exeter's golf driving range has been on my mind for a while. I finally began to grip the subject properly when, with some fellow artists, I began to investigate the history and geography of our locality. I realised my council allotment was on the edge of the former Corporation Brickworks (and later landfill site) and that the driving range was built on top of those brickworks. 

I then started a wonderful online course at UCL run by Bella Riza: Worlds Upon Words: Unlocking Emotion Through Film which I'm using to help me find the shape of this project.

I think it's probably about precarity - environmental precarity, of course: how we are balanced on the edge of catastrophe. But in a more day-to-day sense, about my allotment, one of just 12 precariously perched above the contaminated land below. And how I use nurturing the soil, making room for wildlife, and growing my own food as a way of shoring up belief in a better future, even as more and more of my plot falls away into the brickfield (and I am showered with misfired golfballs).

In my allotment, I'm devoting some space to Exeter's broad bean flock. It's a community growing project, now in its second year, coordinated by Exeter Seed Bank. In gardens and allotments across the city, we're encouraging our different varieties of beans to cross-pollinate wildly to create a broad bean uniquely adapted to Exeter's soil and climate. It's been described as a living seed bank, complementary to static seed banks such as Svalbard Global Seed Vault. So, I suppose, another way of accessing hope and building resilience.

Which leads me on to my contribution to a forthcoming artists' book by Nick Davies The Future Present, for which I'll also be referencing seed banks as a message to the future. I've touched on them before in Mutter Erde, but more of that (and Foreign Soil) in a future post. 

Gorse Cone at the Dorset Open

Gorse Cone, a short film made at Durlston Country Park in Dorset by me and Megan Calver is currently being shown at the inaugural Dorset Open. The exhibition features artists working in diverse media, all with a focus on the region’s landscape, people, history and culture.  

The Dorset Open runs 18 October to 30 November 2025 at the Dorset Museum & Art Gallery, High West Street, Dorchester DT1 1XA

Check gallery website for opening times and ticket prices. 

The Porous Body

Still from The Porous Body | Moving image - work in progress

I'm currently editing a simple four-minute DIY film called The Porous Body. It's the first iteration of a larger moving image project about female mediums in the late 19th and early 20th century.

This first film focuses on materialising mediums (ie those that summoned physical materials, voices and objects to the seance room) and their brush with science. It's a tangled story of faith and rationality, the limited power that women held in a highly patriarchal society, and the obsession of the Victorians with pushing at the frontiers of scientific discovery.

Investigations into these women are well documented* (though the opinions and feelings of the women themselves are rarely noted). All available technologies (eg flash photography, wax cylinder recordings, microscopes) were deployed in an attempt to capture, measure and analyse their powers. Often treated like scientific specimens, they were subjected to intrusive examinations and troubling experiments in order to demonstrate their integrity. It's true, some of their manifestations of ectoplasmic matter do look a lot like cut paper and wet muslin, but many people who witnessed their activities first-hand found them compelling.

*I've based my work on accounts of investigations into mediums published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, the Quarterly Transactions of the British College of Psychic Science and the Phenomena of Materialisation: a contribution to the investigation of mediumistic teleplastics by Albert von Schrenk-Notzing.

Where are we now?

Night Piece | 2025 | Postcard with image and score

“Cutting across a field on a moonless night, we encountered familiar trees as strange new beings. Caught in the flash of our camera, the full force of each tree's unique personhood came to light. The trees seemed as surprised as we were: uprooted from our separate worlds, we found ourselves swimming in the darkness together.”

Megan Calver and I are pleased to present Night Piece (Swimming with Trees) at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery. It's a set of three digital photographs and a take-away artists' multiple (postcards).

Where Are We Now? is a group exhibition by artists belonging to CAMP CIC (Contemporary Art Membership Platform). Considering contemporary environmental issues from multiple perspectives, the exhibition features 40 artists from across Devon and Cornwall including:

Dana Aala, Ruth Bateman, Lottie Bolster, Sara Bor, Katrina Brown, Bob Budd, Megan Calver and Gabrielle Hoad, Erika Cann, Emily Chung, Caroline Collingridge, Gillian Cooper, Rachael Coward, Laura Denning, Marko Dutka, Francesca Elliott, John Elliott, Ilya Fisher, Sue Green, Angela Hilton, Karen Howse, Tim Hutton, Christina (Tina) Kutter, Octavia Madden, Gill Melling, Elizabeth Orcutt, Olivia Parsons, Ann Russell, Janet Sainsbury, Penny Simons, Mike Snudden, Viv Spencer, Charlotte Squire, Frances Staniforth, Stella Tripp, Carol Weir, Emma Saffy Wilson, Patricia Wilson Smith, Claire Winfield and Melanie Young. 

Where are we now? runs 6 September 2025 to 25 October 2025 at Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Elmfield House, Dowell Street, Honiton, Devon  EX14 1LX

Stone at theundergroundstream

 

Lark stone | 2016 | Still from digital documentation of live action | 2m 8s of video with sound

 

I'm delighted to be joining Susie David in a show she's curated called Stone.

“Seven artists consider stone in its simplest, rawest form – a rawness that provides oblique allegories: for deep time, for resistance, for nurturing, and for healing.”

Gretchen Faust | Jem Southam | Megan Calver & Gabrielle Hoad | Maxine Foster | Steve Thorpe | Susie David

Megan and I are showing Lark stone that we made with Susie back in 2016 during a collaboration at Dawlish Warren.

The simple gesture of turning a piece of chert in the hand conjures the song of a skylark: the weight and inertness of the stone contrasting with the bird’s energetic movements and song. The stone sings along, squeaking gently as it is handled.

Stone
theundergroundstream
Home Farm, Churchstow TQ7 2QR
By appointment, weekdays 2-5pm until 30 August 2025

The walls tremble...

 

I'm embarking on a new solo moving image project, provisionally titled The walls tremble, the furniture stamps its feet.*

It's about female spirit mediums of the late 19th and early 20th century. During séances, mediums would demonstrate the presence of other-worldly forces by the tilting of tables and the animation of other domestic objects. Some of this activity was taken to be genuine; on other occasions it proved to be cleverly engineered conjuring tricks. I like this blurring of boundaries; this rubbing up of belief against scepticism, nature against artifice, art against science.

While my end-goal is the making of a short film, which has its own language of trickery and haunting, I find myself heading down quite a sculptural path. I've been looking at ways to make domestic objects tremble, wobble and vibrate. By initiating the visible movement of things we think of as inert or static, I'm acknowledging their agency but also hoping to set in motion - or at least suggest - something more unexpected and strange.

I'm hopeful these misbehaving objects will act as a symbol of the way Victorian certainties were being disrupted by rapid developments in science and technology as well as by massive social change.

*I've drawn my title from an account of a séance by a French journalist in 1857, sourced via an article 'The medium on the stage' by Simone Natale (2011) in Early Popular Visual Culture 9:3 239-255

Stop and look around

Hiding places (home from home) | 2025 | Digital print 

 

 

 

With new collaborative work coming to a standstill, Megan Calver and I have been turning over our archive to keep some kind of joint practice alive. What at first seemed like a stop-gap has turned into an interesting and productive experience.

The film The Signal and the Noise that I completed early this year was our first step in this direction. Megan was able to join me in generating some new footage, but the film's overall motivation was to summarise our making from the past 2-3 years in filmic form.

Now we're looking back over the past five years of work (and occasionally further) to resurrect ideas that were set aside – not because they were bad but because they didn't quite fit the moment. It's interesting what you understand with hindsight: how something you saw as preparatory or experimental adds up to something more substantial in the light of future developments.

For example, we had a series of mobile phone pics of us standing in a field with our coats on our heads. The action was serious but the documentation was casual. When Laura Porter approached us about contributing to a group show called Our Place at Studio KIND. earlier this year, we decided to do a little more production work on the images and stitch two of them together to put our effaced bodies in dialogue. The new print is titled Hiding places (home from home).

Now we've been selected for a show called Where are we now? at Thelma Hulbert Gallery in the autumn. We're drawing on some almost accidental shots we took of trees by flash-light at Durlston Country Park while in residence there back in 2022. The shots sat in a Google Photos album waiting for their moment and I'm about to get three of them printed up to gallery scale with a new accompanying text to make Night Piece (Swimming with Trees).

Although I work within certain repeating themes, I'm often focused on keeping forward momentum – and with some reason. I've found that galleries and commissioners usually seek out work that's no more than two years old. But that's resolved work. Few artists are short of ideas; it's having the time and resources to realise them that's challenging.

It's good sometimes to stop and properly explore what you've done, not just what you're going to do next. This moment of pause and reflection is turning out to be quite rewarding.

Our Place at Studio KIND

I'm thrilled to be part of a new exhibition, Our Place, curated by Lauren McNicoll for Studio Kind. It brings together a number of female artists living and working in London and the South West, with a focus on the female experience, body and domesticity. Megan Calver and I are contributing some photographic documentation of a live action we made while in Purbeck, Dorset: Hiding places (home from home).

Bunmi M Moses | Carole Evans | Delpha Hudson | Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | Jess Scott | Lauren McNicoll | Laura Porter | Leily Mojdehi | Leonie Cameron | Millie Laing-Tate | Mina Fouladi | Monika Rycerz | Poojan Gupta | Sally Taylor | Sarah Chapman | Susana Higuera

Our Place
Studio KIND. at The Corn Store, Barnstaple Pannier Market EX31 1SY
31 May – 28 June 2025
Wednesdays - Saturdays 12.00-17.00

Taking a breath

Breath Drawing | 2025

 

 

 
A new leaf, a blank(ish) page. Some sadness and also some possibilities.

Having got my DYCP-funded film done and dusted (and entered into a handful film festivals) I had started working on contributions to a couple of art exhibitions this summer with my regular collaborator Megan Calver. However, some very difficult circumstances mean it's not to be. 

Over the past few years our shared practice has survived a few wobbles as each of our families hit rough patches, but this time we've had to admit defeat. This is not a situation we can solve by trying harder, thinking afresh or finding workarounds. We have decided, with heavy hearts, that we have to pull out of both events.

I'm sure we'll resume our collaboration later but these cancellations mean I'm left with the strange luxury of free studio time.

I'm not going to rush into things. It's a long time since I had space to reflect and indulge in aimless studio play. I have a new solo film project I'm trying to fund and develop, which can now take precedence. I can also dig back into a long list of half-completed personal projects.

So while my thoughts are with Megan and her family, I am also relishing the unexpected opportunity to breathe.

Trailer for The Signal and the Noise

 

The Signal and the Noise | 2025 |  Warning: flashing images

 

We had a test screening yesterday of The Signal and the Noise. For Megan Calver and me, it was our first time of seeing (and hearing) the film at cinema scale. Our 15-minute short explores the legacy of the World War II engineer and paranormal researcher Alec Harley Reeves, and his collaboration with the spirit of a dead physicist: Michael Faraday.

Most of the small, invited audience of about 20 people had some connection with the film. Many had supported us as we developed the work and ideas that became part of this film. Others provided a voice or made an appearance, offered technical expertise, had input to funding applications, shared material, helped to clear permissions or simply provided support at home to enable us to work. It was all incredibly important to us.

There’s lots to take away from seeing the film in this new setting as well as from the feedback we received. It’s been quite a journey – learning how to make a film by hands-on involvement in many different aspects of film-making. But we have done what we set out to do - make a stand-alone work suitable for submitting to film festivals and screenings.

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England