360º film - drag the viewer to explore the imagery or connect to a VR headset.
Extracts and experiments for an ongoing Immersive Art project for projection in the dome at Market Hall Plymouth.
A journey into our interdependence with the natural world exploring cyclical ideas, where technology forges a relationship with the environment.
Commission: Real Ideas funded by ACE
Music: Ben Roberts
A short film created in collaboration with Mark Carey responding to live artwork by Jane Mason, Grace Surman and Gary Winters on Exmouth beach. With music by Alison Cotton.
Taking the fluidity and vulnerability of the intertidal zone as a metaphor for our relationship with the environment, It weaves a narrative as performers listen to and interact with the sea.
The day was held at sunrise and sunset by a choreographic instruction for a group of sea swimmers and their lifeguard support intervened by; the distressed fish, the desolate seal and the seagrass herder.
Commissioned and funded by the Outdoor Cultures strand for the Creative peninsula network,
Led by the University of Exeter and funded by UKRI.
Supported by Exmouth Beach Rescue Club.
First screened at the Creative Peninsula Summit at the Eden project, November 2022.
Role: Artist & Filmmaker
An on going collaborative art project.
Currently the exhibition is at Windermere Jetty Museum until July 17th 2022
The first Dovetailing installation took place in June 2021 and was an immersive experience combining film, music and mobile sculpture. Beginning with a tree, to the selection of the wood, to the instrument maker and the music, Dovetailing responded to how notes are drawn out of silence. Each visitor made their own way through the space, creating movement, silhouettes and shadows.
Sculptor Juliet Gutch created a series of suspended wooden mobiles that acknowledge instruments as honed and initially quiet forms. I have created a film & sound installation, exploring the journey – from the tree, to the luthier, to the played music and finally the to audience. We worked together with composer and viola player Sally Beamish, whose composition Prelude and Cannon has been specially adapted for the project.
The trailer was created during the spring and summer of the pandemic 2020 for the project.
In the first exhibition at Farfield Meeting House in the Yorkshire Dales the film was projected through the mobiles inside the 17th Century chapel, filled with quiet sound.
In the next exhibition, Dovetailing Responses 4-7 November 2021 at Ilkley Manor House film shown with dual projection on suspended screens that hung throughout the space like trees. New responsive work was included, visual arts, dance, poetry, live music, reactive work led by Art School Ilkley and the option to create a movement sensitive soundtrack using the smartphone app Movuku. Ilkley Literature Festival Poet in Residence Ian Duhig was invited to write a series of his own poems, lead a workshop with a group from Refugee Action and host a reading.
More information on ‘Dovetailing’ here
The book Dovetailing Gathered Notes is available to buy from The Grove Book shop, Ilkley
A short film, created from live recordings made inside the Dovetailing Responses installation. It weaves together some of the magical impromptu moments from the exhibition.
Dance - Beth Cassani & Mati Torres
Bass Clarinet - Les Goldman
Violin- Kerry McMullen
Movuku - Simon East
Documentation film of the installation inside the first exhibition held in Farfield Meeting House June 2021.
Role: Filmmaker
‘Spark’ is a short film that aims to stimulate far reaching thoughts on climate change.
It follows glittering light traveling through darkness, shedding tiny glowing embers in all directions.
Created with fire sparklers, the scenes are beautiful, playful, magical and delicate. Misleading.
How joyful, warm and mesmerising the flickering lights can be; but bright sparks can turn destructive.
The evocation is of a landscape on fire.
With an ambient musical underscore of sinister tones that unsettle the visual imagery; initial quietness is replaced by a crescendo of cracking, hissing and roaring sound.
Ironically ‘Spark’ was filmed during the coldest week of the year. Ice and snow were thick, the howling wind, so bitter that igniting the sparkers was near impossible without a blow torch.
What began as a fun experimental creative project made by a family team, became quite a battle against the elements.
Cinematographer - Mark Carey
Created with the assistance of our children during lockdown 2021.
Commissioned for ‘Chain Reaction’, by Ilkley Literature Festival.
Role: Director
Collaborating with artist family Grace Surman, Gary Winters, Hope and Merrick.
Commissioned as part of the National Trust’s People’s Landscapes programme which explores sites where people came together to have their voices heard. Marking 200 years since the Peterloo Massacre it’s inspired by questions about protest, rights and responsibilities, freedoms and the power to create change.
These projects are supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and with additional support from Art Fund.
This was originally a 3-screen installation artwork. Inspired by portraiture, the films aim was to bring to life the feeling of a family living in the house ‘Dunham Masey’ in 1819. The intent was to achieve the richness and depth of oil paintings through film. To create the notion of period portraits coming to life, the artists needed to speak to the camera and move in an almost imaginary way whilst maintaining a direct gaze out to the viewer.
The noise of the machines in the mill, the idea of protest and the scale of the site and its stories were central to this film. The artists, drummers and local school children are positioned within the landscape caught up in modern-day collective action, the sound of which is reminiscent of traditional uses of marching drums. Evocative of a period but also timeless in its familiarity, the drumming reaches across the ages. The gazes from the children are directed at times direct to camera which immediately challenges the viewer, can we hear their protest?
Role: Director
A short experimental film that celebrates creativity and learning as an empowering process.
A young boy playing as a robot struggles across the huge landscape of Ilkley moor. He’s learning how to navigate the terrain in his physically restrictive outfit made from a large cardboard box. This juxtaposition of playful, imaginative act in a challenging environment parallels the current climate and space for the creative subjects in education.
The ‘robot’ is caught in his moments of accomplishment, joy, effort and play.
Role: Filmmaker
Collaborating with the artist family in residency, for Tenancy.
A direct response to the radical change and growth that has gripped Manchester and Salford in recent years, part of meet the neighbours, an international cross art-form project. Commissioned by Quarantine, Manchester.
Art School Ilkley draw their personal responses to improvisation by contemporary dancer Mati Torres and soundscape artist Ben Walker.
Filmed at Ilkley Arts Castle Yard Festival October 2020.
Role: Filmmaker
I wanted to capture the physical feeling - actions, process, meditative quality, dreaming, thoughts, sounds, monotony, exertion, breathing, buoyancy ... of swimming.
I experimented with the camera to make it swim with me, travelling through the water attached to the stroke.
I came across Anna Calvi’s track ‘Swimming Pool’ inspired by David Hockney’s famous painting and I found there was a quality about this mismatch - my local pool can make me feel I’ve divided into his painting.
Role: Filmmaker
Collaborating with performance artist Grace Surman.
The mother is called Grace, the daughter Hope. What was she thinking of… to name her daughter Hope.
This short film investigates and reflects on relationships between parent and child.
Funded by Yorkshire Dance & Arts Council England.
First screening, The Tetley 2016
Role: Filmmaker
Approaching Nocturne is a short reflective film on the exhibition curated by John Gamble in June 2017 which took place at Studio 24, Leeds. A group of artists came together to generate work in response to Cantabile Chamber Choirs 'This Shining Night'. The work included drawing, painting, textiles, soundscapes and dance. The film attempts to evoke the holistic nature of the entire event, dipping in and out of individual works, whilst creating its own narrative experience.
Role: Director / Filmmaker
Several responsive films created to work of artists Juliet & Jamie Gutch. Their mobile sculptures have been mesmerising to film. Permanently in motion with light and shadow in constant flux. It is impossible to predict the ever changing shapes created, this movement seems to offer mindful stillness to the viewer.
This film explores work inspired by Swifts. The mobiles are filmed in permanent motion. From the moment this bird sets wing it is eternally air born, eating, drinking, sleeping and mating on the wing.
It will only come to earth to nest and breed. Swifts are not designed for land, their wings are too long, legs too short to regain flight.
’Swift as Light’ attempts to express the reverie, of ethereal light and sky on the wing, under pinned by the sadness of eventual return to land.
This film was commissioned to capture the installation of 'A Murmuration of Starlings' as it was suspended in the reception atrium space of the new Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital.
The sculpture takes its inspiration from the enormous groups of birds that move in unison to form vast, swirling, animated shapes forming a collective which has a grace and energy much greater than the sum of its parts.
Workshops with local school children helped form the basis for the design. The hope is that when staff and visitors see the mobile they will experience for themselves some of that grace and energy of a flock of birds in flight. A Murmuration of Starlings can be read as a metaphor for the complex collaboration between people working at the hospital.
‘A Murmuration of Starlings’ is a large mobile sculpture hung in the reception atrium of the new Northumbria Specialist Care Hospital.
Starlings in flight move together, constantly adapting their shape and reforming. A murmuration of starlings is like a living sculpture in the sky.
A little observational film material created during an afternoon workshop run by Juliet and Jamie Gutch for asylum seekers in Bradford.
At the Wellbeing Centre, Bevan Healthcare.
Role: Filmmaker
Music video.
In recent work with children and young adults absorbed in their joy and accomplishment from creative expression, I came across this band of talented 16 & 17 year olds. I wanted to record a live performance for the young band, but set them comfortably at the home where they would meet for band practice every week. The viewer can peek through the windows at a seemingly regular domestic occurrence.
This is a little propaganda film that captures inspirational creative acts by children.
It was made following a Celebration of the Arts evening organised by Art School Ilkley involving 10 Bradford schools, the film was commissioned by Beckfoot Trust.
“A child’s capacity for expression through movement, drawing or music was a means to strengthen identity and therefore social cohesion. Education through the arts, it was believed, was at the heart of the regeneration of democracy. Today the rationale for the place of the arts in public education is primarily economic. In this respect, we really can learn from history.” - Dr Catherine Burke, Education and childhood
Role: Filmmaker
Commissions from Leeds Beckett University.
Featuring Kayleigh Price with BA Dance Students at Northern Ballet ‘The Left one out’.
And ‘Choreographic Salon’ a documentation film of a Dance Research Cluster day held at The School of Film, Music & Performing Arts.
