Using film as a way to come together, have conversations and strengthen community.
LUKE FOWLER AND CORIN SWORN
Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn began a residency with Alchemy Film & Arts in 2024 investigating and responding to High Sunderland, a Modernist home in the Scottish Borders designed in 1957 by architect Peter Womersley for textile designers Bernat and Margaret Klein.
Deploying 16mm, analogue photography, sound archiving and creative writing, the project 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 – encompassing the familial and the seasonal, as well as textile design 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 is 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.
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.
Banner Image: Lochcarron Mill, Selkirk by Milo Clenshaw
Alchemy Film & Arts
Room 305
Heart of Hawick
Hawick
TD9 0AE
info@alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk
01450 367 352
Charity Number: SC042142
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