My last communiqué took the miniature as its theme, looking into the spaces between things in the hope of revealing secret, hidden multitudes. In contrast, this instalment peers in awe at the mammoth, drawing attention to a giant arts project in Bournemouth, on the UK’s south coast. In addition, I reflect on the marvellous podcast How To Enjoy Experimental Film, on which I was honoured to appear as a recent guest, before concluding with three large-scale cultural recommendations, any of which would expand your world.
Esther Teichmann, Untitled from Fractal Scars, Salt Water and Tears (river backdrop), 2012-2014
Psychedelic Romantiscm
Writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent has curated an exhibition called NatureMax for Giant in Bournemouth. Giant, an almost comically ambitious project by artist Stuart Semple, is the largest contemporary art gallery outside London. NatureMax meditates on our changing relationship to the natural world, a world overshadowed by the dread spectre of climate change. The essay by Paul Carey-Kent, written to accompany the exhibition, begins:
How should we relate to nature? As recently as fifty years ago the anthropocentric way of looking purely through the lens of human outcomes was the mainstream assumption. It is embedded in many religions, as when the bible states that humans are created in the image of God and are to have dominion over all other living creatures. That’s never been a world-wide view: for example, indigenous Australian and American traditions have framed man as working with nature, being part of a system in which they are equals in a web of relationships with flora and fauna. But the growing consensus around the effect of a history of exploiting and abusing nature have altered how the west, too, sees the relationship. The question becomes, as Donna Haraway poses it: ‘What happens when human exceptionalism and bounded individualism, those old saws of Western philosophy and political economics, become unthinkable in the best sciences, whether natural or social?’
NatureMax will include two of my films, The Blue Flower (2021) and The Loom (2018), which screen alongside works by a fascinating array of contemporary artists working across a variety of media. Reading through Paul’s descriptions of the works by these artists I noticed that the word psychedelic pops up more than once, suggesting to me that the show might evoke something akin to the hallucinogenic, transformed worlds vividly described in JG Ballard’s increasingly prophetic early novels and short stories. Perhaps, at NatureMax, we will encounter work by artists who have subsumed and translated rising fears of environmental collapse into depictions of phantasmagoric worlds infused with terror and wonder.
NatureMax also features work by Saelia Aparicio, Rebecca Byrne, Theo Ellison, Tessa Farmer, Andy Harper, Sandra Kantanen, Matt Hale, Julie Maurin, Alan Rankle, Kelly Richardson, Esther Teichmann.
NatureMax's opening celebration is on 20/11/21, from 6-8pm. The exhibition runs until February 2022.
For more information visit: https://www.giant.space/
The cover of the Panther Books 1968 paperback edition of JG Ballard's The Crystal World, featuring Max Ernst's 1943 painting The Eye of Silence
Dimension Door
Finished in early 2021 The Blue Flower is one of my longest, strangest films. For the entirety of its 14 minute running time the film peers attentively at the titular blue flower, never deviating from this fixed perspective. Around this flower (a single specimen of Nigella Damascene, or Love-in-a-Mist) innumerable insects and other, more intangible phenomena swarm. Peering closely, these insects seem to occupy a different region of scale from the flower they fly around, suggesting that, by comparison, the flower is mammoth in its dimensions. Despite the fact that the film features only one extended sequence, The Blue Flower proved one of my trickiest films to make. An early mist-shrouded version of the film, edited in late 2019, was shelved after seemingly months of effort, leaving me haunted by my failure to complete it. Subsequently, pursuing The Blue Flower became an odd, inescapable obsession and I found myself reshooting the film entirely in 2020. Remaking it, I soon found that the new film’s gently pulsating imagery proved incredibly difficult to edit as the intangible material seemed to exude a subtle spellbinding power when peered at over an extended period, drawing me into a mildly altered state of consciousness, as if I had become gradually transfixed by the glimmerings of a magic pool. The film seemed to hold the film’s composer Abi Fry maddeningly spellbound too, with the soundtrack only taking final form after an unusually extended period of meditation, after which she unveiled an eerie, haunting score, where the autonomous song of the Aeolian harp is encircled by the beguiling singing of siren-like voices. Where might these lulling voices be drawing us? Perhaps toward the place beyond the cascade of lights…
Critic Borja Castillejo Calvo, in his review of the film for Cinesinfin (an online survey of shadowy cinematic enchantment), suggests, in a phrase that could become a manifesto, that The Blue Flower “redirects biology towards the dreamlike - reconduce la biología hacia la onírica”. For the curious, Calvo’s review of the film is online here. The text is in Spanish but, like all Calvo’s writing, it is well worth translating.
The Blue Flower, film still, 2021
Worlds Assembled
Earlier this year I appeared as a guest on the marvellous H2EEF podcast, where I was able to reflect on my work in depth. In the interview I go deep into how my work is made, dwelling on both mechanics and atmospherics, before ranging tangentially into stranger terrain. The H2EFF podcast, hosted by film-maker Daniel Adams, typically takes the form of an in-depth 30 minute interview with an invited experimental film-maker. In each episode Daniel looks at their work and enquires where it comes from, what informs it and where to see it, whilst also considering the wider culture of experimental cinema that the work exists in. Daniel also poses to each participant the key question: how to enjoy experimental film? H2EEF isn’t a podcast just for initiates, although it caters to those, instead it proposes the approachability of experimental cinema and provides some guidance on how best to engage with work often mis-labelled as challenging. After participating in the podcast I took the opportunity to begin to explore the growing back-catalogue of other H2EEF episodes (each one strikingly different) and I urge anyone with a passing interest in experimental cinema to do the same.
My interview with H2EFF is online here.
A World Assembled, film still, 2013
Carceri d’Invenzione
Piranesi, the 2020 book by UK author Susanna Clarke, takes its name from the real-life 18th century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, known for his paradoxical architectural etchings, the most famous being his series of imaginary prisons (previously mentioned in these communiqués here). Piranesi is a slim volume but its contents swell the imagination with the impression of an enormous architectural space of bizarre dimensions. Rising to the self-imposed challenge proposed by the book’s title, Clarke has created an astonishing depiction of the fantastic made manifest in architecture. The book is set among a series of statue-filled halls which surge with the water of strange tides, rich in marine life. Flooding is common in the lower halls. Birds also nest among the crowded statuary, having flown in from the tiers of collapsing, ruined halls above, suggesting an unknown outside. Below these lower halls are the submerged halls, dark water-filled labyrinths that descend far beneath the waves. These halls appear infinite, beyond comprehension, their architect mysterious. The book suggests that a building could be an entire world - one immense, all-encompassing structure constituting creation. The sole human inhabitant of this world is Piranesi, who lives alone, except from the occasional visits by an enigmatic Other…
More information is online here.
The 14th plate of the second edition of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Carceri d'Invenzione, 1761
Caverns Measureless to Man
Earlier this year I heard a track from Just Constellations, the 2020 EP by composer Michael Harrison and singers Roomful of Teeth, playing on BBC Radio 3 and ordered a copy on record immediately. A lot of the music I have been listening to over the year or so has been of the ambient or psychedelic varieties, music that opens a portal to other zones, evoking either real-world landscapes or the expansive caverns of mental space. The four compositions that make up Just Constellations were recorded in 2017 in Rangely, Colorado, USA, at the Tank Center for Sonic Arts, a former water treatment facility noted for its extraordinary acoustic resonance. From the grooves of the the vinyl copy I purchased a cavernous audio space unfurled, where voices hover as sustained sonic presences suspended in the deserts of space. Listen with wonder here.
Space station. The Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Rangely, Colorado.
The Enormous Space
This communiqué borrows its title from a 1989 JG Ballard short story. The Enormous Space speculates as to what might happen if a recently divorced professional suburbanite made the inexplicable decision never to leave their house again, beginning a process of withdrawal from consensus reality, discovering in its place, a new terrain of time and space. As the front door closes on the outside world the self-isolating protagonist’s domestic environment seems to swell, transforming his house into an expansive landscape where inner and outer realities merge. Read today, this short story functions as both as how-to guide to any future lockdowns and a warning of their potential hazards.
The Enormous Space is included in JG Ballard’s Complete Short Stories: Volume 2.