WELCOME > SCHEDULE > EXHIBITIONS > MOVING IMAGES: QUESTIONS GESTURES WATER FORESTS FIELD

CIVIC SPACE
THURSDAY 28 APRIL – SUNDAY 1 MAY
11:00 – 16:00 / 51’

Content warning: some flashing imagery. 

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Kerry Jones

Moving Images is a new solar-powered eight-seat cinema inside a converted 1980s caravan. Following its first official outing, at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival 2022, the partly crowdfunded community project will tour a programme of screenings and workshops across the Scottish Borders and South of Scotland. Its first presentation, questions gestures water forests fields, comprises nine films made in the region exploring themes of belonging, language, ecology – and of past futures and futures past.

In Jessie Growden’s I’m Not From Here – made as part of her 2021 Alchemy Film & Arts commission and multi-channel exhibition I’ve Only Been Here Half My Life – alphabetised garment labels found in Hawick’s abandoned Peter Scott Knitwear factory punctuate onscreen text poetically conveying the artist’s experiences of growing up as a woman in the town.

The found object at the centre of Jason Moyes’s I Found a Piece of Old Glass in the Field is a piece of glass from a recently ploughed field. What changes, the artist asks, as this glass is held to the sky, as it becomes a lens to see through, as it’s held tight in one’s hand?  Questions seep through James Wyness’s The Sigh, an experiential and philosophical combination of text, photographs, coloured filters and superimposition as the artist imagines upturned stumps as ears and sensory tunnels into a forest’s mind.

In let nature guide my eyes, Sue Thomas traces visual and emotional phenomena – flowing water, flowers and foliage – in a commissioned documentary on the work of Gallovidian silversmith Michael Lloyd. In her meditative Water Life, Mooie Scott animates the abstract patterns and rhythmic ripples of water with poetic narration focusing on body and breath.

The poetry of place is seen through an anthropogenic lens in Douglas McBride’s Anthropocene Suite. Soundscapes of blue whales, a Weddell seal’s singing and deep space haunt images of the Côte d’Opale, a West Scotland shoreline sunrise, a Cairngorm lochan, an alpine summit at dawn.

In Together, Jane Houston Green repeats the phrase ‘the world has time together’ over an image of two entwined carrots spinning in front of a clockface – questioning the power and human impact of language. Jules Horne’s Aye Been: 14 Ways of Looking at a Bean intensifies such themes with comedy to unpick and upend the dubious underpinnings of the region’s common, tradition-retaining refrain: ‘aye been’.

In Empathy Machine, finally, Lily Ashrowan brings the programme full circle by dancing in her family barn in the Ettrick Valley, refracting 1990s rave culture through her parents’ memories and fragments of online archives and borrowed audio – a catalyst for positive change and a longing for collective joy and uninhibited freedom.

PROGRAMME

THE SIGH
James Wyness
5′ – Scotland – 2021

ANTHROPOCENE SUITE
Douglas McBride
7’04 – Scotland – 2021

EMPATHY MACHINE
Lily Ashrowan
3’23 – Scotland – 2022