FOCUS: JESSIE GROWDEN

Alchemy Film & Arts

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

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HEART OF HAWICK
SUNDAY 30 APRIL
10:00 – 11:30 / 64′ + Q&A

Jessie Growden will be present for the Q&A.

The films in this programme have descriptive captions.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

Alchemy Film & Arts is delighted to present this retrospective programme of films by Scottish Borders artist Jessie Growden, following I’ve Only Been Here Half My Life, her 2021 multimedia exhibition supported as part of The Teviot, the Flag, and the Rich, Rich Soil – our programme exploring the borders, boundaries and lines of Hawick and the Scottish Borders.

In her moving-image work, Jessie focuses on themes of landscape, rurality and selfhood, often deploying song and drawing on digital technology’s defining features. Deceptively simple formal queries result in wryly functional titles, as well as quietly moving explorations of vulnerability within the natural or domestic environment. Bifurcated frames are both sought (as in Portrait Landscape (January)), and found (as in Just a Line); the camera is made to complete a pivot (as in the Circle shorts included here); image, text and sound are deliberately severed to complicate the relationship between voice and authorship (as in Location Unknown, Pink and Some Big Rocks); and analogue modes provide visual content as well as narrative structure (as in Jessie Clear Up That Mess and Nice Pictures of Trees).

In her latest work, Training Montage, Jessie performs a ‘body combat’ routine to camera and to music – though we don’t hear the latter, which is retained by the artist as an ‘offscreen’ number heard only by her through headphones. The subsequent emphasis is placed on the artist’s physical performance, captured in breathily wintry solitude, through a camera’s heat-sensitive mode and split screens that allow us to gauge her timing across different takes. Similarly physical, closing film I Canoe Canoe Canoe adds a neat circularity to a programme all about seasons, cycles and movement: if the first word of the film’s title asserts a self, its twice-repeated second word evokes a song-like ellipsis: ad infinitum.

Here, collecting is a form of portraiture, and the accumulation of portraiture forms a practice. As a lyric from Malvina Reynolds’s ‘Little Boxes’ asserts, ‘they all look just the same.’ Only, they don’t: while Jessie’s cover of that song lends structure to Granny Duncan’s Tape Collection, the film’s blink-and-miss visuals demonstrate a singular index of a life through diverse musical tastes.

PROGRAMME