BISCUIT TIN 2024 ONLINE
BISCUIT TIN 2024 ONLINE
“Alex” was made in the year following my graduation from MFA at the Glasgow School of Art. At the time, my work was predominantly in film. It was to be the last year I spent in Glasgow before returning to Edinburgh where I am now based. My film work while doing my MFA had involved spending time becoming intimate with Glasgow by wandering the streets and recording anything and everything that caught my eye. I think “Alex” was my personal ode to the spirit of Glasgow. Sadly I have never found an opportunity to screen it other than on Vimeo.
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Concerned with describing the conflicting spatio-temporal desires of The Avoca Mines, a post-industrial mining site. Questions of ‘home’ and an examination of how one might orient themselves to a now barren land reverberate throughout. The work fuses archival imagery, postcards, text, interview material and my own filmed footage to create a visual and sonic object that attempts to underline the sedimented layers of industrial and commercial influence as well the interpersonal nuances that has come to shape the place, both metaphysically and physically.
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I’m drawn to the idea of animism and the connections between humans and objects. There’s something magical about believing that everyday things hold their own essence, maybe even a physical energy. When I spotted a bike parked next to a no-parking sign, I imagined a story of how it got there. This inspired me to bring it to life, exploring its existence as it moved and glided along the tarmac streets. I thought about how it might react to its surroundings, taking in the sights and surfaces around it. This experiment became a playful escape, a chance to see familiar surroundings in a new light.
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On May 21, 2024, at the Shell PLC Annual General Meeting in London, artistic duo Berger & Wirz filibustered the Q&A section of the conference with algorithmically generated nonsense, confusing Shell Chairman Sir Andrew Mackenzie for over five minutes. During the interaction, Josh stood at the centre of the room, speaking into a microphone, while Axel filmed using a hidden camera, surrounded by three well-dressed but suspicious security guards. The intervention was part of the duo’s ongoing interdisciplinary project, Filibuster, which critically examines the impact of corporate greenwashing on contemporary media narratives and environmental policy.
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I filmed this video very quickly after completing a time consuming stop-camera animated video. The impetus was noticing wheat plants blowing in the wind. Using a painted background and pieces of wheat, the video animates a relationship between wheat stalks. In a playful way, Wheat in the Wind, presents the tenuousness and brevity of relationships. Although posted on Vimeo, I felt that because the video was so easy to make it was too ’simple’ and it was never screened. Prompted by your call, I rewatched the video and now appreciate its simplicity in noticing everyday occurrences and possible narratives of choreographed movement.
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‘I’m here, now…’ was a film that as an outcome for mentorship time with VACMA 18-19. We were editing a 30min cut when the pandemic hit. The themes of our road movie of escape and adventure, finding ourselves, took on new context when the isolation measures came into force. We shot a third act in and out the window of our flat. We’ve sent it to film festivals, proposed to reimagine the work in its parts as an installation both avenues proving fruitless. It has never had a physical space screening. A leaner, 20min cut is presented for your consideration.
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The Derby Ram is an archival montage, exploring an example of the retelling and abstraction of folklore both domestically and internationally, often as a result of colonial emigration. This process creates uncanny mutations of the original stories that, in comparison, reveal the transitory and malleable nature of folk culture. This work was made possible by the seemingly opposing force of social media, which tends to homogenise contemporary cultures, smoothing out geographic and cultural distinctions. By gathering these varied sources, the work highlights how aesthetic practices are exported and reimported as a form of colonial process, generating bizarre cultural feedback loops.
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Taken from ‘The Universal Wand’ by Neil Quigley, a nonlinear descent through the modern workspace, misremembered early 2000’s pop culture, stories from Celtic tiger era Ireland, perceptual lip-reading research and rhabdomancy. With audio from a live solo performance which took place at the Cork Indie Film festival in December 2023, the film focuses on workplace dynamics and utilises phase alignment formant synthesis controlled by a phone’s gyroscope and accelerometer, along with field recordings from dole offices, text to speech conversations between unreliable characters and synthesised environment recordings. Inspired by the work of James Benning, the film focuses on machine learning variations of the famous windows XP desktop background Bliss, imagining what is beyond the borders of the desktop.
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The Trial of Marian Isbister, 2024 B&W Super 8 film, field recordings, soundtrack. A six and a half minute film set around a trial in Orkney for 18 year old accused witch Marian Isbister. Shot on location in Scotland on Super 8 between 2017 and 2023. This film’s initial purpose was to predominately to serve as a ‘proof of concept’ emulating the tone of a future work, an oblique portrait of George Mackay Brown and his home island and muse Orkney itself. This piece, a collage work of archive footage from various trips around Scotland now feels strong as a stand alone piece but it’s primary purpose remains for moving forward to try help attain support and or comission for the portrait film. Excerpt from ‘The Witch’ written and read by George Mackay Brown.
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I intended this to be the first part of a three-part short film, and planned to have the rest completed by the end of 2020. I spent so long in planning for the piece that I got burnt out by the time it came to sculpting and actually animating it. I rushed it to have something for an exhibition, so the sound is very experimental. I feel strange about it, and you can see little funky things like the reflection of my camera logo, but I like it more now and want to give it a bit of appreciation.
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Oil is wrought between deep time and its manifestations of futurity, haunted by its eventual depletion. Research for this work has considered the affective atmosphere of petrocultures. Using found and original footage of Petrochemical extraction, Isle of Man TT motorbike racing and Irish Sea energy infrastructure, attention is drawn to both the proximity and dislocation of these sites. Layered across the film, sound design is punctuated with dialogue that gestures to language as a process of fossilisation, mirroring the spectres and sediments of fossil capitalism. Here, it speaks to the felt realities of acceleration, constraint, consumption, burning up, breaking open.
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When:
We will keep this online til 7:00pm Tuesday 10th December (maybe a little longer) so watch is now while you can.
We’ve included the links to the artists own vimeo or youtube pages so you can come back to them in the future.
Venue:
All films have been closed captions please hit cc if you would like to watch them with these
Other events
Wednesday 7th October, 18:30-20:30
No More Painting
14:00-15:30, Sunday 18th October