While I've been putting the art world to rights, I've also been making and remaking films. I'm still very much a learner when it comes to moving image - trying to working out what kind of films I want to make and how much of the making I want to do myself. My latest adventure is in stop motion and green screen - two technologies I never imagined I'd be using. However, they have turned out to be the best way to manipulate an image of a rose for my latest film about Victorian mediumship.
I have in my mind the idea of 'apports': objects such as fruit, flowers, jewels and even live birds that materialised in the seance room from other locations. (Film itself is, of course, a tricksy, haunted medium, very well suited to exploring the contested powers of mediums.)
I'm thinking about a rose that travels across time and space as we hear the words of Emma Hardinge Britten (1823 –1899), a writer, orator, trance clairvoyant, and spirit medium who advocated for scientific acceptance of mediumship and spiritualist phenomena. She was a sincere believer in the powers of mediums and I'm focusing on an article she wrote for The Spiritual Magazine in 1871 where she directed attention to the 'movement of a single rose leaf' as reason to believe in 'the opening of the gates of a new science'.
At the same time I'm working on a new edit of The Signal and the Noise, not to replace but to reinterpret some of the material and give greater emphasis to Reeves' words. It's been quite a job as the original film, which ties together much of my and Megan Calver's thinking from 2021 to 2024, is tightly constructed. However, as a stand-alone cinema film, it now feels too busy and oblique. It might work better as a gallery film, where it could contextualise the different sculptural works we made during that period as we drew inspiration from the landscape and wartime history of the Isle of Purbeck. Although finding a suitable space to make such a show is a challenge in itself...
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