ON WEAVING

Alchemy Film & Arts

Using film as a way to come together, have conversations and strengthen community.

ON WEAVING

Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn began a collaborative residency with Alchemy Film & Arts in 2024, investigating and responding to High Sunderland, the Scottish Borders modernist home of textile designers Bernat and Margaret Klein, designed in 1957 by architect Peter Womersley.

The resulting film, On Weaving, premiered at the fifteenth edition of Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival. A new publication featuring stills taken at the film locations and new writing by Lisa Robertson was also published to mark the film’s premiere.

Deploying 16mm, analogue photography, sound archiving and creative writing, On Weaving considers High Sunderland from a multitude of perspectives, as a cinematic framing device, a structure and organism through which to understand dynamic processes of change.

The film encompasses the familial and the seasonal, as well as the textile designs of twentieth-century Eastern European émigrés, amelioration and conservation, macro and micro expressions of climate and landscape, and the broader historical legacies of the Kleins and the Scottish Borders’ textiles heritage.

Luke and Corin’s residency was part of The Teviot, the Flag and the Rich, Rich Soil, Alchemy’s programme of artist residencies supporting the generation of new knowledge through long-term, practice-led research and multidisciplinary partnerships.

If you’d like to screen this film, please get in touch.

Luke Fowler‘s practice is multimedia in its perception and outcome, with analogue filmmaking at its core. ‘Filmmaking for me is very much a social process’ he says, stressing the importance of collaboration with other artists, musicians and writers. Often made in collaboration with other artists, musicians and writers, his work often investigates the social rules, conventions and disciplinary practices that underpin mainstream society, serving to marginalise a minority to live on its edges. He unflinchingly observes its viscous undercurrents to bring to the surface awkward and unresolved complexities at its crux.

Corin Sworn engages with language, materials and place as transversal living concepts. Staging relations between moving image, installation and experimental writing the goal is to evoke thought in motion and understanding as experiential and changing. Recent exhibitions include Moving in Relation, The Common Guild Glasgow (2023); ‘Cumulo’, with URRA, Buenos Aires (2022); the radio play Fabric Noir with Jude Browning for Radiophrenia (2022); OCAT Shenzhen (2021); Edinburgh Art Festival (2019).

Sworn was awarded a Leverhulme Prize in 2016, the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2014, and teaches at Northumbria University.

PRESS

‘The house, Sworn notes, is “porous”. Such permeability threads its way throughout the film in terms of its soundtrack: factory machines – heavy, thudding – are heard over wide shots of the house’s smooth surfaces; softly spoken conversations play over close-ups of the nearby river and the surrounding trees.’

Read Eilidh Akilade’s feature interview with Corin Sworn for the Skinny.

PRESS

‘”The film is a rich portrait of the Klein home as well as of active sites of textiles production in the Scottish Borders. Its use of analogue film to capture these places in all their colour and texture provides a lasting snapshot of our region’s architectural and industrial heritage.’

Read the BBC’s preview of the film.

PRESS

‘The tempo of labour and the region’s cultural heritage were preoccupations of On Weaving… The film builds associative rhythms between the edit and the loom, the movement of the camera and the grid-like architecture of the house, creating playful connections between the making of the film and of cloth. Films about architecture often wrestle with the challenge of conveying three-dimensional space cinematically, something On Weaving seems to counter through reflection, transparency and camera movement. The gradual build-up of visual information gives us a sense of the house as a lived-in and living entity, always subject to seasonal and historical change.’

Sophia Satchell-Baeza for Sight and Sound (print only)