Well, it's been a while! I do hope some of you are still here. Rose is budding, at 10 months the most gorgeous wee girl is beginning to bloom. You can see her on my
Facebook page. Other than this, I've been screening
Filmpoem, though quietly and restricting it; I seem content to keep the films in their dotcom box.
StAnza was a great success, sold out and humbled by a warm crowd and the poets all reading so well infront of the films. There's was a great review of the festival in
The Spectator by Andrew Giles. I've been commissioned to make a new Filmpoem for the
Felix Poetry Festival in Antwerp in June, and invited over to promote Filmpoem there too. My most recent film is The God of Sugar, with Vicki Feaver and Luca Nasciuti, for the Absent Voices project, something I'll talk more about later, something exciting for 2013!
Anyroad, the future. I talked briefly before about collodion. Collodion is an emulsion which provides a basis on which to make wet plate photographic plates. It was concocted by an Englishman in 1851, Fred Scott Archer, though later patented by an American. I made a film about my first experience, 2 years ago, in Kensal Rise:
So, you get the gist. Magical, mercurial and a real process embodying hard work, smelly chemicals and a certain mania. It's taken two years to fully get under my skin, though taught by
Katie Cooke and
Carl Radford and greatly encouraged by both, I've waited for a suitable opportunity and North Light is just that: I'll be spending June researching and then July in residence in the recently refurbished McArthur's Stores on the quay in Dunbar, working on a wet plate series of the fishermen, their families and their lives. There will be an exhibition in the local museum and gallery later in the year before it travels and then winds up in the form of a book, hopefully mid-2013. I've recently been influenced by the work of French wet plate photographer Jacques Cousin and his uncanny ability to pull together the triptych, a form which has long fascinated me:
I've decided to write a
visual diary, which will begin on June 2nd as I'll be there for the Regatta. I do hope to see some of you there. I've cut enough glass to make portraits of you all!
