Live cinema and sound artist / cultural geographer Amy Cutler and floral designer and artist Alice McCabe (see website) create bespoke flower arranging projection events and pop up plant cinemas inspired by unusual ecologies. These have included a submerged flower arranging performance projected live at Brighton Sea Lanes as part of the three day durational event, Swimming A Long Way Together (2023), an experimental invocation of community swimming practices in honour of Mercedes Gleitze. They are also available for commissions and bespoke performance.
Cutler and McCabe premiered their collaboration with a pop-up foraged plant cinema for the penultimate night of Deptford X Festival (2023). They created a live cinema / AV performance and creekside flower arranging ritual by the full moon, in honour of the aster weed and the creek’s strange ecologies. Taking place at the Creekside Discovery Centre, the performance combined live floristing, sound-making with mud-larked glass and metals, and projecting through creek water as well as a display of votive artefacts found in the creek over the years, from the centre’s archive.
The moon pulled apart the clouds to hover over the floral mesh cinema screen, whilst broken creek Gods ranging from Shivas to Ronald Macdonald were dressed in fragrant herbs, bright dried flowers, and those historically found along embankments. The performance experimented with forms of arrangement with natural and man-made detritus projected through water gathered on site. Cutler and McCabe created an altar to findings in the creek and explored these items in relationship to rubbish, such as supermarket trolley eco-systems, which provide vital structure often for mudbanks and smaller shoals of fish. A bankside floral hanging was loosely inspired by the embanking of the creek over the last centuries and was made from plants connecting to the area, including hops (which would have been transported in abundance from Kent to breweries) willow, buddleja and Michaelmas daisy (which is celebrated the day prior to the performance, with feast of Archangel Michael and all the Angels.) These flowers were all sourced locally to Deptford and foraged with permission. Bespoke projection surfaces within the hanging were inspired by plankton mesh and specimen inspection nets, similar to the forms of chiffon and holographic fabric used in stage and projection illusions.
