PUBLIC AND PRIVATE NATURE IN THE FILM LUDCHURCH CHANNEL (2020)
LUDCHURCH CHANNEL combines individual and communal rituals of landscape in Staffordshire. Flowers, festivals, parades, pageantry, and games are woven together in the textures of rain, mosses, ferns, and liverwort. Created as one of Festival Stoke’s Festival Echoes artist residencies, the film draws on field trips to the site of the National Garden Festival in Stoke-on-Trent (1986) as well as a number of chasms, rock features, and hidden caves/tunnels/ruins in Stoke and surrounding areas. The historical footage and new footage together explore seasonal rituals and gatherings, as well as private secrets in the landscape, especially Lud’s Church chasm.
This weird moss-covered chasm has links to history and literature, as a Lollard gathering place for singing death chants, as a haunting place for Alice Lud’s ghost, and possibly as the fabled site of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at the year’s end. My visits during the day and night included 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. In fact, this camera got bad reviews for making dental patients uncomfortable because the doctor had to get so close. The sheer intimacy of these images were captured with Velvia 50 slide film, and later projected with a carousel projector in a homemade projection booth, using iridescent black paint on the projection surface. This gives a sense of the original site’s strange, glistening hollows and shapes, which at times almost appear like constellations, or galaxies of moss. The viridescent (“becoming green”) effect of the Velvia film and the projection paints are suitable for the unusual sites, bringing together the human and nonhuman threads of the “green chapel” as both a private and a public channel in the landscape; a hidden place for individual ritual, but also a shared space at the same time.
The archival footage is all sourced from the Staffordshire Film Archive thanks to the help of Ray Johnson and shows the social histories of nature, from aerial experiments to fancy dress costumes to the role of the Garden Festival in regeneration initiatives. Throughout this process, I was interested in ideas of land regeneration, and of Lud’s Chasm as a channel of recovery in the landscape. The score I created includes field recordings of the River Dane and the mossy chasm’s strange echo chamber resonance as a space for individual reflections or secret ceremonies, using meditative guitar scales and processed electronics. The split screen aims to offer an online equivalent to what would have otherwise been a multi-screen installation of projections in the sites in the landscape itself. During Covid and social isolation, each of these sites may be visited alone, or remains an outdoor gathering place – such as the recognisable profile of the Roaches in both historical and contemporary footage.
Going back to ideas of “armchair” v. “amateur” geography which are enshrined in the history of nature documentary, this artwork made during the constraints of lockdown in 2020 aimed to find new connections in these perspectives of shared amateur passion – which are not, in fact, about the passive consumption of “sitting in an armchair”, but about new, active, real and viral forms of landscape access and accessibility, broadcast into homes and connecting us. It experiments with cultural heritage and new ways of channelling nature through shared creativity, opening up the meaningfulness of these “expeditions” in expanded re-animation of archival landscapes and landscape textures, going beyond ideas of Nature as the “Big Outside” to imagine our ecologically shared living spaces. As part of this process, a public open call was made for people to contribute their own photos of their views of nature in Staffordshire, all of which have been incorporated into this work.
The film was made with the assistance of Mark Williamson (and his campervan), and the advice and company of lead artist Anne Kinnaird, who also recommended several of the locations. The visits to the contemporary site of the remains of the National Garden Festival, between a car park and industrial centres near the canal, mean the film balances textures of nature: the tended and cultivated award-winning gardens and profusions of parade or festival flowers which bloom in the film, as well as the weeds and wildflowers now growing on the old site, and the uncanny covering of Lud’s moss and liverworts.
This project was part of Festival Stoke 2020. The other Festival Echoes projects can be accessed here.