Category: Landscape

Art, Landscape

Responses: Avebury Photos (1933 + 1942) – Paul Nash.

The landscape painter and augmenter, Paul Nash, had a momentary, glimpsed relationship with the Wiltshire town of Avebury.  The landscape, which brims with a sense of ancientness and magic, evidently enraptured the painter for a brief spell of creative yield not simply in painting but in photography as a sideline as well.  Caught in the trace images and memories of its Neolithic stone circles, its … Continue reading Responses: Avebury Photos (1933 + 1942) – Paul Nash.

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Film, Landscape, Literature

Ghosts in the Ice

On finishing W.G. Sebald’s novel The Emigrants (1992), it felt as if some loose connection to a recent film or book was left hanging mid-air. The narrative of Sebald’s novel is split into the stories of four émigrés, all seemingly interconnected by a multitude of strange images but chiefly by their fleeing from the rise of Nazi Germany. The connection didn’t seem to be so … Continue reading Ghosts in the Ice

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Art, Landscape, Literature

Responses: Blind Landings (2013) – Jane And Louise Wilson.

Debris degrades and degradation can be measured but can art be this measurement?  Orford Ness in Suffolk, a former atomic weapons mechanism research and testing facility, doesn’t ask these questions but the place has attracted such a huge number of artists to its shores that the question of creativity and its role as a reaction to such politically doused spaces cannot help but be evoked.  … Continue reading Responses: Blind Landings (2013) – Jane And Louise Wilson.

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Film, Landscape

Fear And Loathing In The Countryside – Withnail And I (1987).

British cinema is obsessed with the effect of location upon the individual.  In fact, it wouldn’t be so sweeping to suggest that large swaths of culture born on these isles stems from the idea that the individual can be deeply molded by their surroundings and any fictional drama from Albion will be bare the aesthetics of its areas as far more than a setting.  While … Continue reading Fear And Loathing In The Countryside – Withnail And I (1987).

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Folk Horror, Landscape, Literature

Salthouse Marshes (Ghost Story).

In October I released a ghost story for Halloween.  It was partly inspired by Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, but the majority of its actual narrative structure (especially in terms of character) came from a short story of my own inspired as well by Blackwood’s story.  As it’s near Christmas, the original story is presented below.  It’s very typically Jamesian and should be read late at night … Continue reading Salthouse Marshes (Ghost Story).

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Folk Horror, Landscape, Literature, Psychogeography, Short Film

Showreel 2015.

Above is a showreel built from footage I’ve shot over the last twelve months.  Compared to last year’s showreel, this one feels far more defined and less haphazard with the visual ideas I want to play with.  Gone are the mixtures of stop-motion, digital and film, instead replaced entirely by different stocks of super-8 footage.  This year has felt like a much more defined trajectory … Continue reading Showreel 2015.

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Film, Landscape

The Breeze In The Grass – Elemental Realisation in Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975).

In last month’s issue of Sight & Sound (November, 2015) Nick James details his relationship with the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky in line with the season of films he’s curated for the BFI.  Though the article is chiefly surrounding Tarkovsky’s (vast) legacy, one aspect in particular caught my attention whilst reading.  He refers to a scene from Tarkovsky’s 1975 film, Mirror, which partly accounted for … Continue reading The Breeze In The Grass – Elemental Realisation in Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975).

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Folk Horror, Landscape, Short Film

Short Film – Salthouse Marshes

Salthouse Marshes began life in a strange way.  Having chatted about adapting Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows with Robert Macfarlane (who had wanted to re-set it in England), there was always to be a “haunted waterway” film on the cards.  But, after constant reading of the narrative of The Willows, the thought of organising the filming on two boats and on celluloid simply proved too intimidating.  … Continue reading Short Film – Salthouse Marshes

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Film, Folk Horror, Landscape, Psychogeography

The “English Eerie” and The Landscape Venn.

As I write this, it is just under two weeks to the Spectral Landscapes event in Oxford.  Put together between myself and the Oxford University’s Romantic society through Jen Wood, the event is looking at the resurgence of interest in work across all forms of creative media which looks to the landscape in order to find essences of the “eerie”, especially of that in English … Continue reading The “English Eerie” and The Landscape Venn.

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Art, Folk Horror, Landscape, Literature, Television

Uncanny Portals And Standing Stones (Children Of The Stones, The Owl Service and Barbara Hepworth) – Part 3.

Part 1. Part 2. The Eeriness of Landscape Entities. The final aspect to assess is the natural eeriness created from putting an object within a landscape; here, it is the context of such an action and implications of the aesthetics that is key.  When Hepworth’s work is situated in the landscape, two things can occur.  The first is that the link between the work and … Continue reading Uncanny Portals And Standing Stones (Children Of The Stones, The Owl Service and Barbara Hepworth) – Part 3.

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