Throughout 2016, I’ve been trying to respond to artwork about landscape in more ways than simply essays. I found that in trying convey work that I liked, there was only so far I could go with conventional journalistic and essay writing. At the tail-end of each response article, I’ve been sneaking in a poem about the work and its themes so thought it would be … Continue reading Responses: Poems On Landscape and Melancholy
When recently interviewing the writer and filmmaker, John Rogers, the setting of our meeting place in Stratford played heavily upon my mind. Such was the contrast between so many of the buildings and spaces within the area that many ideas came about just from a quick meander around its many new developments. Because of this we agreed to reconvene at the place a few weeks … Continue reading Wanders: Planet Stratford with John Rogers (London).
I have been lucky enough to have this year’s Halloween film, No Diggin’ Here – a film about M.R. James, Aldeburgh and A Warning To The Curious – premiered on the BFI’s website. It was a Halloween treat that, until I saw it happen in full, I didn’t quite believe, but I count myself incredibly lucky for such an opportunity. A few weeks back, the … Continue reading Short Film – No Diggin’ Here.
This presentation was originally given at the Folk Horror Revival day at The British Museum (16/02/2016). My thanks to the fellow admins of the Folk Horror Revival, especially Jim Peters and Andy Paciorek. There’s an overt connection between analogue technology and the narratives surrounding paranormal activity in British horror, especially when made during the 1970s. No doubt there are connections between the interest in such … Continue reading The Ghost In The Grain: Analogue Hauntings of the 1970s
The photography series, Areas Of Outstanding Natural Beauty (1982-1984), was the first work I came across by Keith Arnatt. This was some time before he would eventually be back in vogue thanks to Tate Britain’s well received conceptual exhibition, of which his most famous work, Self Burial (1969), was the publicity image for. Very much like the landscapes that so much of Arnatt’s work captures, … Continue reading Responses: Keith Arnatt’s A.O.N.B (1982-1984).
There are few writers that figure more prominently in everything I do than the teller of beautiful Edwardian ghost stories, M.R. James. Alongside W.G. Sebald, J.G. Ballard, Alan Garner and Virginia Woolf, his writing holds a great power over me with its familiar yet unfamiliar worlds. His writing preys upon my mind at regular intervals, even outside of the Christmas period from which they were … Continue reading Trailer – No Diggin’ Here.
John Rogers has been one of the most prominent psychogeographical writers and filmmakers of the last decade. Fiercely independent and with a strong DIY sensibility towards his creative responses to London, his work is a vital component and documentation of a city still in a phase of hyper-development and gentrification. Ahead of his adaptation/response to Iain Sinclair’s most recent book, London Overground, I met up … Continue reading Interview: John Rogers on London Overground and Psychogeography.
I remember being sat on a bench on Dunwich Heath in September last year and seeing the dome of Sizewell B for the first time as an adult. I had just walked a little way down the coast, after a day of filming further down at Orford Ness, from Dunwich beach through to the heath. I simply was not expecting to be greeted by such … Continue reading Short Film – Heavy Water.
As a last hurrah of being on Merseyside before moving, I decided to revisit a place just down the road from where I’d lived on The Wirral; armed with a desire to dig up some of its surprising past glories. I’ve been going to the seaside resort of New Brighton for as long as I can remember, often as a place to sit off and … Continue reading Wanders: The Magnet and The Last Resort (New Brighton).
Like the work of sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long’s work immediately asks an intriguing question: which part of the work is the official segment of “art”? Is it the very process of making it and performing which constitutes the work or is it the documentation of such a process? It needn’t be such a binary state of affairs; the two potential options have a fluid … Continue reading Responses: Richard Long’s A Line Made By Walking (1967).
Celluloid Wicker Man 