Subterranean Harvest
July 2020
A film commission by Fermynwoods Contemporary Art’s new two-year programme of artistic interventions in public spaces across Northamptonshire, In Steps of Sundew. The programme explores the push and pull between nature and human presence and the effect that extracting resources from the landscape has upon those living within it.
My film extracts images from the digital screen and the rather formalised narrative of industry, iron and the archive that four Corby Heritage films present.
The film is made up of printed stills of Double Harvest (1960), The Great Jib (1952), Iron Ore in Britain (1956) which have been physically cut up,torn, ripped, stained and soaked. These pieces have then been reassembled to form new narratives, with each frame of the film layered on top of the previous one or elements taken away.
A build-up of material, a sense of layering.
Such a technique mimics the construction and deconstruction of the Northamptonshire landscape that the source materials depict and considers also the social/natural history at stake in such interactions.
