A Rural Idyll
In the Forest Garden
Inner Landscapes
Absent Presence
Trace
Photomontage
Performative Drawing
Act of Listening
About
@hortus_silvam
2023
Stop-motion animation, musical composition
A tender animation with awkward, imperfect melody.
Stop-motion animation, single channel colour HD video with stereo sound composition composed and performed on a 20 note hand-cranked musical movement
Cinematic screening: 3 mins 46 sec
Gallery | Site specific exhibition: continuous loop with sound
The fruit is a quince, Cydonia oblonga, grown in the Forest Garden; beautiful, aromatic with a feminine roundness; the downy skin of youth glows vibrant yellow and ages to deeply crinkled browns. In this animation the fruits, at different stages in their lives, suggest the cyclical generations of mother and daughter, the one nurturing the other, taking turns simply to hold each other in an all encompassing embrace. The awkward, distorted melody composed using a 20 note, hand-cranked musical mechanism, repeats; a lullaby? Or perhaps a lament? Taking inspiration from the words of Carl Jung, ’Mother-love’, is one of the most ‘moving and unforgettable memories of our lives. It is ‘the mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming, shelter and long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends…’
Absence Presence is an ongoing project of visual laments, exploring inter-generational aspects of loss and grief and abandonment.
Location: Forest Garden, Suffolk
2025 screened as part of Dialogues by Sophie Standford (UK)
DIVFUSE Film Archive No.1 with a theme on domesticity.
grief, memory
© Sophie Standford