Partners
Dryden Goodwin
March 2020
I’m interested in how you capture a sense of someone, of other people, and how you try to understand someone. How you try to articulate an idea of what seems to motivate them, the way they navigate the world, and also to try to get insight into how they see things.
That’s happened in different ways. It might be people that are known to me, it might be strangers that I meet, it might be people who I build relationships with through the actual making of a piece of work. Then, thinking about ways you record, the ways you capture, and also ways you translate and decode some of that through how you draw and through the way you use a camera and sound recordings.
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I’ve always been really intrigued by the idea of portraiture but also had quite an uneasy relationship with it as a categorisation. At the heart of it for me, it’s not just about making a rendering of someone, but it’s about questioning how and what you can learn by looking at others. A desire to try and reveal aspects of the world by looking at others and where and who you are, in relation to them.
There’s this inevitable exchange between yourself and the people that you’re looking at, and this sense that you’re accompanying someone on part of the journey. That might be for a fraction of a moment, or it might be more sustained.
There’s always this balance between something which is like the idea of ’measurement' - but then there’s this idea of just being immersed, absorbed, intuitive and responsive.
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Paul said very specific things about his work as a care worker, such as, at the beginning of the film, ”It’s all in the looking, isn’t it? It’s all in the observing, you know, so you can just build a bigger picture of the person.”
This became the key to the film. This building in little details, small fragments. Then a bigger picture of someone takes shape. That’s a description of what Paul’s doing in his work, and that’s what I’m doing in mine. That becomes really important, the incremental. In the film itself it’s as much about what isn’t there, as what is, so there’s spaces for the imagination to leap across the gaps, like you would in a drawing. I didn’t want to reveal the whole picture at any point, I filmed from oblique angles or from behind, or made both swift diagrammatic as well as more worked tonal drawings, I kept switching between what I was seeing and what I was feeling.
You put a mark down on a piece of paper to make a drawing, and it becomes this series of relationships between these different points, in your process of trying to translate and decipher whose in front of you. In a way the whole film is like this. These fragmentary marks, that might accumulatively find an incomplete cohesion at a certain point. The blank page is of course as important as the marks themselves.
I think that Paul is making those imaginative leaps all the time in the way that he works, in terms of building a picture of the people he works with. For some of the people, he can’t ask them how they feel in a conventional way, he has to be inventive in decoding their motivations and anxieties, to find a way to connect.
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Initially my proposal for the WORK project was to make a film about a health care worker in a very different context: day visits, looking at their rhythms, both the contact with people in their homes, but also the spaces and the times of the journeys in between, how that would form the structure of the film.
The opportunity to work with Paul opened the process up in ways I hadn’t anticipated: the hyper vulnerability of the people that he works with, and the essential element of trust. Trust is central to the work Paul does, and it’s also important in the filmmaking process, when you’re asking to be invited alongside finely balanced relationships and delicate situations.
The initial conversations between Paul and I, via Skype were very important before meeting. Then when I went to Derby for the first time, we sat and were in conversation for many hours, but, importantly, I’d be drawing him at the same time, which meant I began to accrue further layers to a multi-dimensional sense of him.
After hours spent in Paul’s kitchen and a local coffee shop, the next day we then went to Community Links in the throng of the energy, the activities and the people he was working with. The oscillation between drawing and working with the camera was really important, in the way I needed to negotiate being pulled in and pushed out of a situation in different ways.
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When collecting material you’ve got to be calm, collected and receptive; the attraction of it is also to be completely enveloped and inundated within all the sensory dynamics of the exchange.
I think there’s a parallel with Paul’s work in how it mirrors this in someway – the relationship between what he’s doing and the state he’s in when he’s working, balancing precision and tenderness. He needs to be completely on it, but also in tune, in a very empathetic and understanding way. It’s a professional relationship, but it’s also about the world of feelings, in the way that he relates to each person individually.
To me there’s something really exciting in looking into that. Another aspect of what drew me to the WORK project is that artists have a very complex relationship to the idea of work! So there’s this reflexive space that opens up when you start to look at the world of other people’s work, that’s implicit in the film and exchange.
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In watching and listening to Paul, it’s about what he’s doing, but also about how he reflects on what he’s doing - the drive behind how he relates, also through what he says, how we can interpret the values of a society by how it supports its most vulnerable. Throughout the whole film there are ideas of observing and perception. There’s his, there’s mine, but also the young men that he works with, and how Paul understands how they might read people, and interact.
For some of the young men, that’s complicated, because of the extremes of their neuro-diversity, they struggle to read body language and the world around them.
I think that relationships to perception, and observing, and how it’s possible to understand others, is a core theme that came out in the making of the film.
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What was impossible to anticipate was what would happen throughout the day. Paul would spend each day dedicated to one person and constantly adjust, dependant on the needs of the person he was with. I realised that I just had to be completely prepared with my small kit of pencils, paper, camera, and another camera on my chest, so that I could record the drawings as I was making them, and to be completely open and responsive to the logic of the day and how it panned out, a need for fluidity and adaptability. As Paul was alongside each young man, I was alongside him.
The way Paul works was another key, as was the notion of patience, which I think is critical, as was slowing – slowing right down. That the world is a hard place to negotiate. Patience became a profound aspect of the whole experience. How anxiety can quickly come to the surface for the young men he was working with, the need for him to be a ’constant’, an ever supporting navigator.
The sense of each pairing, venturing from the day care centre for a period of the day; either Paul with Jack, David or Rob, into the city centre, exploring and supporting each man to access the world - next to the river, at the swimming pool, cycling through the city, at the gym, or in different restaurants - a changing ’figure-ground’ relationship. We’re in Derby, but it also seemed somehow abstracted to epitomise a sense of the expanse of the world beyond the shelter of the day care centre - Paul and each young man, integrally linked for that period of time.
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There’s something very engrossing about listening to six or seven hours of recorded conversation then editing and honing it down. The intertwining of the structure of each of Paul’s days with the sequencing of the phrases and ideas he spoke, becoming the spine of the film.
Paul is a musician and an artist when he’s not working as a care worker. At a certain point I thought, maybe, I’d feature that in the film – those parts of his life beyond work – but then I realised that those sensibilities were in everything he did, every interaction. The inflection in his voice when he spoke gave a sense of musicality: how he uses melody, whistling, how he breaks into short phrases of song, how this creates a space, a reassuring containment, a kind of holding pattern. This in turn influenced the soundtrack I made, I picked up on little details of the tone of his voice, also the rhythms of his interactions such as the accompanying walk next to Jack in his wheel chair through the shopping centre; the careful pace with David as they approach the swimming pool, or the adrenalised abundance of energy released in Rob’s bike ride. I wanted to reflect in sound what seemed just beneath the surface, the interlocking of the sensory and the felt, between Paul and who he was with.
There is something about the quality of Paul’s voice; a calmness, but also a precision in what he was saying, shifting and giving way momentarily to frustration and indignation when he spoke about the wider political backdrop and the lack of support and funding.
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Jo’s role as the Producer was really important. She listened with me to the recordings of the conversations I had with Paul. Whereas I highlight phrases in the timeline and excavate from there, her approach is different to mine, she writes the words down, she maps what’s said differently. Our editorial exchange opened up space to thinking about the words differently, myself as someone who was there, Jo who was not.
Then, once a selection is made I test the phases and ideas more, by whittling them down. Stripping out words that seemed extraneous, honing down to try and get to essential ingredients of what Paul’s saying. Then those phrases become part of the material of the film. You internalise them in some way, their shape. The process begins by responding to what’s said, then it almost feels like writing, how you set one idea against another, to try to make sure that there’s space around what Paul has said, in the shape of the film and how this influences the edit of the images and creation of musical elements.
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When I was with Paul in the situations he was in, it’s hard to describe, but it felt strongly collaborative. In terms of a conventional collaboration with Paul it wasn't that, but, because of the intensity and the nature of the exchange, the need to be open to each other’s process had an influence on the film that was made.
I’ve made work before where I’m involved in the worlds of different people over a sustained period of time, but I haven’t made a work before which has at its centre, just one person.
Jenny Holt
March 2020
I'm drawn to places where the landscape feels caught in tension. Where I live in the South Pennines, there’s a visible and historical tension –avisually kind of primeval landscape haunted by the remains of the industrial age. There’s a strangeness about it, as if something vital is hidden. I’m interested in the dynamic between the pictorialism of this landscape and its entangled identities - past and present, urban and rural, bleak and sublime.
In East Northamptonshire there’s a similar interface. There’s a strong farming culture and visibly arable landscape, as well as a hugely significant logistics economy – an instantly visual counterpoint. Fields and sheds nestling up against each other. Then there’s the accoutrements of that: the roads, lorries thundering past.
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This visual counterpoint was the springboard for the project. Nearly all my work starts this way – usually an image, sometimes a sound, evoking incongruities of place in some way. I'm very practical; I tend to have a rationale for everything I do, so a documentary methodology is a natural process. I worked in television documentary production for a while which was a very systematic way of working, and I learned a lot from that. I began researching in an open ended way - talking to people living or working in the area, organisations and workplaces, visiting libraries and museums, going for walks, hanging out in fields drawing, recording sounds, gathering observations, thoughts, ideas. Initial conversations with the District Council reinforced the focus on logistics and agriculture as the area’s key economies. Exploring Thrapston’s history opened up correlations between them. As well as it’s arable viability the town’s strategic location at a key river crossing point and trading route led to the granting of its market charter from King John in 1205. So both these present-day economies can be said to have historic roots in the town. This history also sparked my interest in forestry. The King’s royal hunting ground Rockingham Forest neighbours the town, pockets of the forest still in existence now managed by Forestry England. It’s interesting as my project partner Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, besides being named after one of Rockingham’s woodlands, has two arts project and education bases in nearby forest locations. So the working practices which feature in the film are all specific to the place, and connect in some way to the town’s medieval market charter. References to medieval Northamptonshire creep into the film in other ways. Drawing or filming in the landscape, the area’s ubiquitous church steeples impressed themselves - this later led to the inclusion in the film of stained glass windows from one of the neighbouring village churches.
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I made contact with some of the town’s distribution companies who allowed me inside the warehouses. They showed me round and took me through the operations processes - I was able to take photos and talk to some of the employees. It was a fascinating experience. The sheer number of international employees at each hub took me by surprise. Going into the distribution warehouses made me more conscious of the relative invisibility of the workforce - their work, the systems, the products of labour, taking place away from public view. This is true of a lot of other economies too, but an inside/outside dialectic began to emerge more strongly, delineated by the initial visual idea.
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People were incredibly friendly, open. Happy to talk. Inquisitive. After what turned out to be a pivotal meeting with Thrapston Young Farmers, I narrowed my focus on young people setting out on their working lives. I was just so impressed with how they talked about their work, describing particular skills or tasks or experiences as if telling a story, with such energy and enthusiasm. This sparked ideas about connecting tiny, seemingly insignificant tasks of work with wider narratives and networks of place and landscape. I was also interested in how people's own stories, their subjectivities of work and how they felt about their work might be suggested or materialised in the film. We would talk - about how they got into what they were doing, their motivations, their ambitions. You can't hope to include any more than a tiny piece of that in the film, but it does inform your approach. I found them so articulate and thoughtful, able to speak in a philosophical way about their work, and their lives. I’m just kind of really rooting for them - I want them to do really well in life.
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The project’s duration over roughly 18 months was invaluable for ideas to filter and develop in a reflective way. It also allowed for repeated visits over the seasonal year. What would appear to me as dramatic and rapid changes in the arable landscape came as something of a shock each time I visited. Sudden changes in colour, patterns in the land and light. The harvest season was spectacular; the research period during the summer of 2018 was incredibly informative in how it was captured on film the following summer. There was also space for participant observation with Erin and Rowan as a way to capture a kind of tacit knowledge of their work before we started filming. I asked them both to teach me a skill – something I felt was probably quite difficult but they had learned easily and were able to perform automatically. Erin showed me how to worm a ewe who had just given birth, and Rowan taught me the correct way to plant young fir trees. He would show me and explain, while I took photos, then we switched places. So we both had the experience of what the other was doing. Rowan uses his camera a lot in the forests, and is an accomplished photographer.
This way of working extended to the observational filming process. Very quickly, in fact, the very first shoot I did, I thought, “Oh, yes, we're working. I'm working, they’re working, both working, but we're also having a conversation.” It was very important not to direct anyone. We did discuss beforehand what activities we’d film though. With Rowan in particular, there were obviously risk assessments, mainly because he was felling trees - it was lot of work for them to allow me to be there and film. So it did have to be managed to a degree, but I tried to limit that as much as possible.
It’s a very active and physical process. The shearing day was the most intense. Constantly moving, watching, repositioning. And then, you know, you’re jumping around between inside and outside – you reframe, there’s white balance and exposure and ISO and depth of field and then it's over, the sheep’s already gone. Constantly seeking, feeling, participating in it. I got too close to a sheep while trying to capture that incredible leap after they’ve been sheared, and the poor thing landed right on top of me – luckily we all plus the camera survived the crash. You’re very much in the experience. Erin taught me to roll a fleece while the shearing was going on, so I’d occasionally jump off the camera and roll a fleece or two. It’s a really exciting way to work, and it feels such a privilege to be there.
I was recording the sound at the same time, using a variety of different mics including binaural and contact mics – a lot of the diegetic sound in the film is a mix from two or three different mics recording simultaneously.
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I recorded conversational interviews with all of the participants, but I didn't know if or how they’d be used. The whole process evolved. I have been a painter and then a television documentary maker, and I sometimes think of what I do now as a kind of synthesis of those processes. And I see moving image, even digital film, which I shoot on, as very material. So my feeling is that I’m literally getting my hands on the material when I'm in the edit. Pulling and pushing and picking out and layering, shaping. I see it like a substance, almost like paint.
It’s an improvisational process, and that’s partly the reason for collaborating with an improvisational musician for the score. I’ve rarely worked with music, and never with a composer or original score. I imagined an improvisational musician would be more adaptable to the fluidity of this process; I was interested to see how a musician might respond to the images and rhythms of the film, and how my editing might respond to their sonic ideas. I was doing drumming lessons and loved its physicality, and how playing a beat – and not playing it, the pause or space – made me think about life and time in a new way, which was feeding into the project. I found improvisational musician and drummer Felix Weldon through the Jazz School in nearby Rushden, which felt like it was meant to be. Felix was incredibly patient with my experiments and I was blown away by his work. After some back and forth between image/sound and music, Felix’s final recordings from a live performance in response to a timeline of shots from shearing to night harvests were worked into the fabric of the film, creating a space for new ideas, prompting me to imagine the world I had observed in a new way.
I did start with one framework - the seasonal passage of time which mirrored my filming period from spring to late summer - and as a companion to this, a structure approximating the span of a day from early morning to night . This meant for example making sure I had 4am shots of oil seed rape fields in full bloom in April, the start of my filming period – the shots which open the film. So then I had to keep the time of day in mind a bit as the season progressed.
The Great Bear references the constellation Ursa Major, which never sets below the horizon in the northern hemisphere and is visible all year round. Partly I was thinking of the participants in the film in that way, as a constellation. But I was also thinking about how these individual subjectivities, movements and focused tasks of labour in a tiny area of England ripple across space and time, how it’s all connected. This is one of the reasons I didn’t make a more overtly political film. And it was a particularly significant time politically as all the filming took place over that intense Brexit paralysis period of 2019. But I feel that as soon as you even tiptoe into that debate it gets entrenched and you're drawing lines. I thought the film should float in another kind of space, which means being sensitive to its permeability, a kind of fragility. You’re always negotiating that.
Esther Johnson
March 2020
I’m interested in forms of documentary; in alternative social histories, those told in an authentic voice. Marginalised stories, looking at how those could be told. Repeated conversations with people and oral histories, are something I’ve used a lot in my work, rather than a formal traditional journalist interview set-up.
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I was always struck by Bolsover when driving past it on the M1: the fairy-tale castle; the topography of the land; the ex-mining, post-industrial landscape. I’d already done a project with people who’d been miners’ children during the 1984–85 strike, and I’d explored how the strike had affected them. The histories of those landscapes, I think, are really fascinating.
Bolsover is quite different from other mining communities in that you’ve got this castle on the hill. It’s like an allegory of English history and politics: the castle on the hill, the people below. Then swathes of newly planted forests where the pits were, but you’ve still got whole areas – like the old Coalite plant that’s still locked up - that are just piles of rubble and detritus.
The actual look of the land said a lot to me about the history of politics and the working class, the them-and-us, and the national and the local. That was something that really attracted me about the location.
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I found out about the Freedom Community Project https://www.fcgroup.org.uk food bank and community cafe and this was my starting point for meeting people for the project. I had a long talk with Mark North, founder of Freedom, to understand, from the ground, how and why it was started, what was needed in that particular community, and what was unique to the inhabitants of Bolsover. I was trying to understand what the present reality of living in the town was especially for those struggling with gaining or sustaining work.
When meeting Mark, I was very much trying to understand why he started Freedom. Him personally, but also where it was now and how it was helping the community. It was being very frank really, asking him about his own background and what was it that led him to start this. It’s a big undertaking. It’s commitment and you have to have passion and empathy for others.
I’d read a lot about Dennis Skinner. I don’t think there is any other area, really, where an MP – now ex-MP – and his own history is so closely identified with that of the area. I set up a meeting with Dennis at the library, trying to get behind his story that he’s always telling. Dennis later gave myself and one of participants in my film, and Freedom centre former volunteer and now staff member, a fascinating tour of the Houses of Parliament.
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I read, and re-read, a lot of material about work, at the start of the project. This included E P Thompson, Henry Mayhew, Raymond Williams, classics that look at history from below and the authentic voice of lived experience. I was also thinking about the micro-histories of Carlo Ginzberg, and hauntology, including writings by Mark Fisher. Contemporary works included Darren McGarvey’s (aka Loki) ‘Poverty Safari’.
In addition I read a lot of literature on post-industrial landscapes, and the scars - both physical and metaphorical - of such places: including texts by sociologist Alain Touraine (who coined the phrase ‘post-industrial society’); Joseph Rowntree reports; CRESR reports – the Centre of Regional Economic Social Research at Sheffield Hallam (where I’m Professor in the Art and Design Research Centre). I conducted research in the local studies section of Bolsover library. I especially love the Bolsover town guides I found there. I think they say a lot about how a town is presented – advertised, basically. It’s not necessarily visible in the completed film, but with any film, there are loads of things that you never see in the final cut, but which need to be investigated in order to arrive at the essence of the final film.
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One of the things about the whole project is spending time with people over a long period of time rather than simply meeting once. I have formed some really lovely friendships and still see some of the participants in the film, for instance Jeanette and I regularly meet for tea and cake.
After my initial meeting with Mark I started to go to the Friday coffee mornings at the Freedom Centre, which were for the community to have a free cuppa and a slice of cake. Some people are very isolated. It is a way for them to spend time with others. Also, it’s a mechanism for the Freedom Centre: if anybody has concerns or troubles, it’s a comfortable environment for them to discuss them. By being in the centre regularly, some of the volunteers could see if some people were struggling but were uncomfortable or wary of asking for help.
I’d sit in the café and would just chat with people. First, it was telling people who I was and what the project was about, and asking people if they would like to talk about their working life, how was the current state in Bolsover. I had a lot of those chats with different people, over a few weeks.
I think the association with the Freedom Centre was a conduit into those people’s lives because they thought, “Oh well, if she knows Freedom Centre and she knows Junction Arts then she must be okay.” Some were familiar with Junction Arts from the lantern parade, and that opened doors.
Then I went to the Freedom Fun Day, and just mucked in. I helped taking down the marquees and all of that. The same with the café, helping out. With Stephen, I worked in the foodbank with him. I went and collected food from supermarkets for the foodbank. It was lovely. I wanted to do it. It wasn’t conducted in a cold or strategic way.
Through Stephen I found out about the reading group. I hadn’t expected to link with one group for the project and be with them pretty much every week. I met a whole community of people, volunteers as well as Bolsover residents who needed help.
When I’d become part of the reader group, we organised trips to Yorkshire Sculpture Park, to Bolsover Castle. Yorkshire Sculpture Park was a place that many hadn’t been to. When they went, they were like, “Oh, this is great, it’s such a lovely place.” We took a picnic and everyone brought a different item of food.
Then we’d talk about those trips in the class the next week. They were fun, lovely things to do, and it was good for everybody to be together in a different environment.
I still help-out with the reading group. I’ve made them a poster and website to encourage others to join the class, and provide free literacy resources. I encouraged Declan, Stephen’s son, to start up a Facebook group. Jeanette (who founded the reading group 7 years ago when Stephen needed help) organised an exercise in the class the other week about the historic Eyam plague village in Derbyshire, and we related this to the coronavirus! They all want to go to Eyam village now, so we’re going to try to organise a trip.
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It’s their story and it’s their words.
I recorded several conversations with each of the people in the film, transcribed those, then created a script using their words. I edited the text, then went back to them, and we sat together and thought about what they were and weren’t happy with. It’s a way of trying to disrupt a surface telling of the story. So they’re both writing and telling their stories. Some people read those stories in the film, but some people, including Dennis, riffed around their text.
Serena was slightly different in that from the beginning I wanted a young person in the film – somebody who didn’t necessarily have a direct connection with Bolsover’s mining heritage. It’s hard not to reference that in some way. Usually stories of Bolsover are that and only that.
Serena’s mother was in the reading group. They’d had to use the foodbank, and Serena had been a carer for her mother since she was about 13. She was working in different ways than, maybe, the conventional description of ‘work’.
I’d met her at a coffee morning. She’d come with her mum. I asked her to go away and write her story down. So that was different in that it wasn’t a recorded conversation. It was her written story. Then we met and went through it and refined it, and talked about how it might be shot.
I think the whole thing of going back to them and reassessing their story allows for greater reflection, and actually an extended telling of personal stories. There’s something profound about the opportunity to reflect, and not just speak and tell a story verbally in one go.
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With the reading group, Jeanette prepares exercises for the class each week. Then we would add another exercise or element that was connected to the film ‘WORK’ themes. I started with was a short questionnaire so they could think about their history of work and what work meant to them.
Having some those conversations, and repeated conversations, has helped class members to have a stronger realization of worth and contribution to their community. For instance one class member said how she’d never considered her caring responsibilities as work before, and could see all the skills she’d learnt from undertaking that role for years.
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I had this idea of the classic fairy tale. Fairy tales are pretty nasty and dystopic. Workers are often undermined by landowners and the gentry.
I wanted to have Bolsover Castle present as a visual element in the film, but side by side, juxtaposed with the landscape of the Coalite plant. Bolsover as a place is the sixth character in the film. There is beauty and wasteland in equal measure just like the dichotomy of a fairy tale.
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I don’t generally film talking heads. I try to encourage a closer attention to what people are saying so many shots are asynchronous were you hear a voice but you see a landscape. Only Dennis is filmed speaking to camera. The day that he was going to be filming with me at Bolsover Castle, he had to be in London for a Brexit vote. Alternatively I managed to arrange to film him in the Houses of Parliament instead and so took a different approach within the limitations of filming in that environment.
Trying to organise filming some of the participants was very, very, difficult. You can’t, by any means, organize in a traditional film shoot manner, and you have to be prepared for change and thinking quickly on your feet. You work around participants, which is fine and I knew that would be the case. It was, however, even more tricky than I initially thought it would be.
Throughout the making, I was thinking about the national and the local, and the effect of national politics on the local. What does it mean for the people on the ground, their everyday lives? That was another reason to include Dennis: he was a link between the national and the local.
Adam Lewis-Jacob
March 2020
I think there’s a much broader, more interesting way to talk and think about practice that’s not going to be very conclusive in a short way, but opens it up for the longer discussion. If I knew the answers now, I’d just stop.
From one show to the next, or one commission to an exhibition, working with a curator, all these relationships are very, very different. They require different approaches and different sensitivities. It’s project by project, so I’m always conscious of the fact of the context that it’s working in. I make quite a lot of stuff that nobody sees that goes into the videos, so that’s probably close to collage in some ways. But I wouldn’t really call them anything. They’re parts of the process.
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A lot of it is conversations. I take different approaches, and I talk about things in different ways, and I have different kinds of conversations with people.
Rather than an interview or discussion, it's something in which the other person has an equal interest, or equal agency, so it feels like it’s to and fro. Making sure we’re both comfortable with what we’re talking about and why we’re talking about it.
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I was interested in WORK initially because it flowed on from a previous film I made called Wildcat, about the work of anarchist cartoonist Donald Rooum, who was affiliated with Freedom Press in Whitechapel, London. I would visit there a lot and read their books some of which were about work, so I had been researching similar things coincidentally. The TURC archive also includes Steve Bell drawings and animations, so I was able to continue looking at satirical British cartoons. But from the beginning to the end, aside from the more performative elements, the other elements completely changed. From it being an idea that was anti-work, to just conversations with people. Whatever they said and came up with was whatever guided it.
It’s almost that the medium is the conversation, instead of, say, video, or clay or whatever if you’re a sculptor. But conversation is always pretty important, even if I’m making sculptures.
I try not to decide what the conversations will be about before they happen. There might be a rough plan, like something as broad as ‘work’. It’s about ‘making’, and making decisions is a limitation in some ways. I understand that that’s not a commonly shared logic, but I’m trying to do the opposite.
There are multiple layers of decision-making. A lot of the time I’m trying not to make any decisions at all, so it’s a tricky balance between opening it up, but then still providing a space where people and ideas can come together, in unexpected ways. You have to edit in some ways, so I do sometimes think about trying to limit, but I want those considerations to be as non-closed as possible, so they might start up new questions or new lines of enquiry, because I don’t really want to be didactic or make propaganda in any way.
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I care a lot about the people I have conversations with. That’s a process. I think form is quite different; it ties in aesthetics, decisions about filmmaking; I find it easier to talk about those things in more definitive terms. But how you generate the content that fits into the form, that’s the element I try not to tie down too much, and not to make too many decisions about.
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I met the contributors mostly through Yasmeen at Vivid - people who were part of the Trade Union Resource Centre, and people working now with the archive. With Marian, the video worker for TURC, it was easy because she had the stuff to show, to talk about.
Marian had already started to put some of the TURC films online, so I immediately had access to the archive through YouTube. I had watched pretty much every single thing that was relevant before I met up with her. And I’d highlighted key people that I’d wanted to speak to, like Idrish and Ranbir. Then through meeting them I would be told about other people like Ian and Cathy. And then there were the Steve Bell animations, and I was interested in using animation again, developing tehw ork I had doen previously in Wildcat with Jason Kerley an old friend and illustrator who collaborates with me on the animations elements in my practise. We also use to organise exhibitions and gigs together. So a lot of the relationships I make evolve and grow, I like working with people multiple times. And I like how new ideas can come out of this approach. For example, I developed and expanded the animation work into a new work for an exhibition at Peak in London and I’ve just returned from Bangladesh with Idirsh, where we were filming a new project we are making about his life and work as an anti-deportation archivist. So the research is now spilling out into new direction and taking me to new places.
The collaboration with other artists was already decided in the proposal stage. I always knew that I was going to do animation with Jason and I always knew I was going to work with CC and Alicia in a more musical or choreographed way using workshops to reinterpret the archive. It also provided an opportunity to continue to define the working relationship I have with Elizabeth Murphy, which is part producer, part researcher, but is also something else, something we haven’t yet found the right way to describe.
There was a mixture of research from the archive, but also reading, or talking to people that have nothing to do with the archive, and coincidences and associations.
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Whilst researching and developing the project I stayed at Marian’s house. I mow Marian’s lawn. So I get to see and understand a different side to how she works and how she is. And we have a genuine friendship, I care deeply about her and the work she has done. There’s a lot of unseen and unheard stuff that goes into it all. It’s quite hard to quantify and wouldn’t really be good to write about, but it’s really important to me.
If we’d met up in a more traditional documentary approach, maybe once, or several times it would be different…but I stayed with Marian a lot. It’s hard to track that sort of conversation. I would sometimes write questions, but I realised that wasn’t really how it was going to work or how I wanted to work, I wanted it to be more spontaneous, more natural, without having to restage things, which often is the case with documentary making.
Sometimes we’d turn the camera on and have to do it, but a lot of the time, when you have these conversations, you only get about 5% of the good stuff, because most of the good stuff is when the camera is off. Maybe that’s again a different approach to filmmaking.
Maybe the formal approach is easier to talk about. I know what the process was. I just interviewed a bunch of people and through that process, and repeated meetings, we became friends. Once I had their trust, then I could just use that. We’re still friends, and that’s still important. I hope they like what I do, but I also have to be able to stand by it, trust my intuition, and find a way to make something that will interest me in the future, something I can come back to, that reveals things I didn’t see or notice at the beginning.
Then similarly with the performative elements, that was also friends but from a different area. They’re not involved with the archive, but they’re involved with similar things that I am, and they are political people, some of them. The main thing is, through those conversations, the friendships really seemed to be quite important. It’s quite like a friend film in some ways, but then maybe all films are!
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I feel that, maybe, every time you reveal something, you might be shutting down something else; it has the potential to lessen the impact. You’re making these things, they last for longer than you. Everything that I feel about the film will be different in a year. By the time we’ve finished, showing it in the different places and the amount of time that will take from when it was first shown, I think, will have a huge difference. Then I’ll finally be able to step away and think about it.
It’s perhaps a film that almost embodies, rather than represents, TURC or its politics. It doesn’t really tell you anything about TURC in a very direct way. But I hope you might get a feeling of what TURC is about, in a different way.
Making a film that embodies its research rather than presents it. I think that the way CC and Alicia contribute is political too; their movement and singing is similar to what the archive did, in some ways. Also, the archive did literally turn into an arts organisation. There are dancing films in it and animation, and am-dram. The politics are still there. They’re just very different, but they expose, kind of, a post-union strength. Which is dying, it turns into this very strange neoliberal arts thing. I like some of these later films, but I don’t know if they have the same direct impact for people as the TURC films achieved.
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The archive material itself is so visually interesting, as an artist, to work with. Because of the way I worked with it, it’s quite like material. It’s like collage or making a sculpture out of clay. It’s all cut up, and painted over and changed around. Having Steve’s penguin to redraw, make melt, shatter, droop and sing songs is an example of this, and grew into something else. It comes from the archive, then appears throughout the film, and eventually escapes into its own separate work, but is always trapped by the screen and the limitations of its own body, which it is trying and failing to escape from.
At first the plan was that I would produce a research interview archive which would sit alongside the final film, whatever form that took. Then the stuff that everyone said in the interviews - important, good things – took more of a focus. It would be weird to keep that to the side, so it became a part of the final film as much the other stuff. At the beginning I said I wouldn’t include any interviews or archive footage, but then it became clear I had to contradict that plan, to set parameters and then break them. And now the film is probably 50% archive and interviews.
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I think it’s more like carrying on the conversation rather than being discursive. I think with the film there’s more likelihood that you could watch it and it could feed onto another conversation that someone could have, it might take a while for the ideas to present themselves to you. As it’s not didactic - you have to work a bit to find a meaning, you can’t just follow the story as it’s intentionally quite cut up. That moves things outside of the film. That’s more interesting than us watching it in the room, and then all talking about it in that room and nothing happening when we leave that room!
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I want to make art, I don’t really want to make documentaries, but I like interviews as a format. I like to listen to the stories that people have to say, but then I also like finding something different to put onscreen whilst they’re saying it.
I’m trying to set something in motion and have no control over it. You don’t want to accidentally make people say things to fit your agenda. And pairing images with sound can be very manipulative or illustrative. So I’m trying to find a way that isn’t so typical, as I know it would bore me very quickly, and not do justice to the complexity of the subject being talked about.
As much as possible, I try and be alongside the work as much as possible. It takes a really long time, and it makes it hard for me to talk about, because I never really make any conscious decisions of questions. It makes the editing really stressful because how do you pick one thing over another? Unless you’re trying to make a coherent argument, but part of me is trying to fight this coherent argument.
I don’t want to make a coherent story, because I don’t think that’s true to the situation. I guess that’s why I’m not doing that.
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Providing a space for Idrish’s films to be seen has been important. At Birmingham Museum, Idrish invited someone to talk, there were some of his friends, but there were also some young activists. That was the whole point: to try and have this cross-generational conversation. It’s not anything that goes into the final film, but it’s the stuff around it which is interesting to me. And the event I did at Vivid, with Susannah Stark, where she sang songs to clips I edited from the archive - it’s about finding new ways to communicate things I can’t say.
The film itself is a platform. An exhibition, rather than a documentary.
