WELCOME > SCHEDULE > SCREENINGS > ON WEAVING

HEART OF HAWICK
SATURDAY 3 MAY
17:00 – 18:00 / 26′ + Q&A

BUY TICKETS

Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn will be present for the Q&A.

This film has descriptive subtitles. The introduction and Q&A will have BSL interpretation.

Content warning: contains flashing imagery.

PROGRAMME NOTES
by Michael Pattison

In On Weaving, Alchemy artists in residence Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn respond to the legacies of textile artists Bernat and Margaret Klein and their modernist Scottish Borders home. Designed by the architect Peter Womersley, High Sunderland was completed in 1958 in a woodland opening near to the River Tweed and where the Kleins had acquired a mill to produce self-designed fabrics.

Shooting in 16mm, Fowler and Sworn have made a film rich in texture and even richer, perhaps, in the associative connections they make through montage, sound and visual assonance. Taking the house as a starting point, the artists embrace the ‘push-pull’ effect of site-sensitive research, creating filmic snapshots that mimic, in both their mode of production and formal-narrative composition, the pliability of thread in a loom.

At once angular and continuous, the single-storey abode is captured here as a place of flux, with Fowler and Sworn observing seasonal shifts in ways that feel simultaneously granular and broad. The camera formally approximates the particularities of the house: note the focus on reflections, transparencies, grids; those upward tilts that point in literal and metaphorical ways to recurrent notions of verticality.

Scenes of a summer reception at the home hint at functions beyond the museal. In this way, the film is an affectionate portrait of High Sunderland’s current owners, the architecture and design historians Juliet Kinchin and Paul Stirton. The visual presence and audio testimonies of the film’s primary subjects – the casual anecdotes, the incidental remarks, the references that historically situate the Kleins and their own practices within a broader artistic lineage – lend the film its sense of lived-in contingency. 

This sense of human contingency is emphasised by the interspersing of scenes filmed in active sites of textiles production along the Teviot and Tweed rivers, including in Hawick. Here, the cyclical whirs and throbs of factory machinery – as well as more intimate scenes, such as that of an ‘oot worker’ doing their job from home or an interview with a former mill worker recalling strikes for parity in pay for women – connect the Kleins and their fabrics to an ongoing present. To this end, On Weaving is among many other things a tribute to labour as a plural and inescapably gendered concept, encompassing material and intellectual practices of equal urgency.

A new publication accompanying the film, collating photographs taken at its filming sites and excerpts from a forthcoming novel by poet Lisa Robertson, is available to purchase during the Festival from our welcome desk on the first floor (mezzanine) of Heart of Hawick. 

PROGRAMME