Moving Image
Displaced Space 3:20
Displaced Space documents the museum status sculpture studio/workshop of Barbara Hepworth in St Ives and explores the notion of artists workings spaces as memorials - or not.
'Something of Barbara is bound to be retained in her tools.
Assorted mallets, steel rasps, chisels and hardboard circles of various diameters that she used as templates. One or two stone blocks are placed in position for carving, plastic goggles lie around, and dusty, paint-splattered overalls hang on the door. '
Image from Barbara Hepworth Studio St Ives
tones after sunset 3:35
In tones after sunset furniture is used as a medium for exploring what it might have felt like to be Gwen John, inhabiting through the exploration of the interior spaces of the cabinet fragmented moments of a possible history based on both fact and fiction.
Still from - tones after sunset
Delete-Space-Shift-Return 12:02
Can the history and atmosphere of a building remain intact regardless of changes to its original structure? Filming and photographing the studio of Liverpool artist Herbert Tyson Smith to create Delete–Space-Shift-Return was an attempt to explore this question by capturing the disappearing moments of some of the last physical experiences of a space that has been in creative use for the last 75 years
Sculptors at work, hammers striking chisels, brooms sweeping into layers of plaster dust. Anonymous sounds of random radio music growing loud then distant, echoing voices speaking indistinct words. Strange forms created with marble and plaster casting shadows. A dusty old chest of drawers appearing to hold untold treasures within.
The three stages of the studio’s transformation over a two year period reveal the contrasting atmospheres created; first the working studio, a vibrant, cluttered creative space, filled with sounds, people, objects and productive energy. Next the empty space, a sense of abandoned stillness, a calm and silent interior awaiting public exposure. Finally the startling mechanical and human invasion in the act of de-construction, loud, shocking yet carefully executed, preparing the ground for a new structure based on the familiar fabric of the past.
Territory/HOME 4:58
'The old house, for those who know how to listen is a sort of geometry of echoes. The voices of the past do not sound the same in the big room as in the little bed chamber, and calls on the stairs have yet another sound. Among the most difficult memories, well beyond any geometry that can be drawn, we must recapture the quality of the light; then comes the sweet smells that linger in the empty rooms, setting an arial seal on each room in the house of memory. Still farther it is possible to recover not merely the timbre of the voices, "the inflections of beloved voices now silent" but also the resonance of each room in the sound house. In this extreme tenousness of memory, only poets may be expected to furnish us with documents of a subtly psychological nature'.
The Spoils of Poynton - Henry James
Earth Life Seen From The Moon 21:34
Susan Walsh + Lubaina Himid 2007
In 2007 Susan Walsh and Lubaina Himid worked with ideas around women’s creativity and the madness which can develop from ‘seeing too much’. Their recent film Earth Life Seen From The Moon, juxtaposes museum and domestic interiors connected to their lives as women, as artists, and as constantly interested observers. It previewed as part of Prestival 2007 and was shown in the exhibition Talking on Corners , Speaking In Tongues at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston and at Aberytswith Arts Centre as well as being screened as part of the international conference Melancholic States at Lancaster University 2007.
Almost twenty two minutes of fast moving footage, juxtaposes the interiors of a London museum vault, an 18th century Liverpool arts space in demolition and an elegant Edwardian house inhabited by artists in Preston . A voice over and music hovers and weaves backwards and forwards summoning spaces of madness and creativity.
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