LUDCHURCH CHANNEL
for Festival Stoke, Sept/Oct 2020
LUDCHURCH CHANNEL was my project for 2020’s edition of Festival Stoke, combining ideas of individual and communal experience of landscape, and of Lud’s Church itself as a form of ‘channel’ in the landscape. The final film is now installed online on this separate page; the original project notes and materials are below.
“During my residency as part of Festival Stoke’s Festival Echoes programme, I am creating a film and a soundpiece based in this mossy chasm. This website page will act as an evolving storyboard for the film, with call outs for participation. The sound piece will be available to listen to online, or as an mp3 download to be listened to on headphones while descending the stone steps into Lud’s Church.
I will post updates on the progress of various experiments, including field recordings, the re-animation of existing archives (including the Staffordshire Film Archive and histories of shared environmental regeneration through the National Garden Festival), and notes on the cultural and material histories of this natural cleft in the landscape. I will tweet images, videos, storyboard notes and annotations showing the working process of the film and its specimens and inspirations. This film-as-public-laboratory will make visible the process of bringing together the human and nonhuman threads of the “green chapel”, as both a private and a public channel; a hidden place for individual ritual, but also a shared landscape at the same time.
The project will involve at least one site visit, using particular techniques to capture and diagram it. This will include natural macro photography of mineral and plant textures, using my Yashica Dental Eye, an old camera designed exclusively for the up-close-and-personal: intra-oral photography, forensic imaging, and macro-photographs of teeth. This camera got bad reviews for making dental patients uncomfortable because the doctor had to get so close.”
PARTICIPATORY CALL OUT: This year Festival Stoke is taking place differently. While visiting landscapes separately, according to the new rules of social distancing, how can we still experience them in a festival or in ways which bring us together? Amy Cutler’s Festival Echoes project, LUDCHURCH CHANNEL, aims to show this, working with places in Staffordshire as both a private and a public channel. The artist’s original filming, sounds, and images have been made on trips to sites such as Lud’s Church. This naturally hidden mossy chasm (or channel) in the landscape is both a hidden place for individual ritual, but also a shared landscape.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: Contribute your own photos! From a close-up on the tiniest veins of a leaf in your garden, to a strange plant found on a landscape walk, to an overlooked or secret part of nature in the city. All you need to do is upload your photos to social media (please use public and not private settings!) with the hashtag #festivalstoke. These unique perspectives will be brought together and woven into the final film. The deadline for sharing your own images and hidden natures is October the 18th, so get out hunting!
The film will screen as a festival event open to all online, and includes field trip footage, as well as material from the Staffordshire Film Archive about shared histories of nature, regeneration, community, and even the National Garden Festival (1986). Cutler has also been creating new macro photography of hidden, dark nooks around Ludchurch, getting particularly close by using her Yashica Dental Eye. This is an old camera designed exclusively for the up-close-and-personal: intra-oral photography, forensic imaging, and macro-photographs of teeth, with a ring-flash adapted for the darkness inside people’s mouths. This camera got bad reviews in the 1970s for making dental patients uncomfortable because the doctor had to get so close to the patient. Now that we need to maintain social distance, it is an ideal (while also very surreal) way to experience the mossy, small, private secrets of landscape in the dark – but then bring them together to be shared again.
