The Unearthings
A Rural Idyll
In the Forest Garden
Inner Landscapes
Absent Presence
Trace
Photomontage
Performative Drawing
Act of Listening
About
@hortus_silvam
2019
moving image; sound; writing
Storm statically observes the wealth of sensations a storm brings to this dainty, porcelain cup and saucer, selected with a touch of irony for its sweet strawberry decoration, placed on a garden table, a receptacle of weather over the course of a summer’s day.
Single channel HD video | short film | colour | 8’20” | sound
what cup and saucer,
trivial, fragile vessel?
what dark history,
imperfect, decorative society?
a storm without forecast brings
rich petrichor of rain,
sparkling and dancing
bittersweet
Like a musical composition Storm unfolds a tension and release of sun and rain, shadow and reflection, lightening and thunder. A different domesticity belies this apparently fragile cup and saucer as it fills and flows; inherent is the human and environmental cost of tea and coffee growing landscapes. As the clouds pass sounds vie for attention climaxing in a lightning flash with distorting thunder. As the storm passes, elements of a summer day can be heard returning as people reemerge from home and school.
Location: Forest Garden, Suffolk, UK
The Forest Garden Project is a proposition, a developing concept which exists somewhere between ecological research, quiet activism, ritual, experiment and performance. A choreography of inter-disciplinarity. A space full of contradiction, where time confuses and dissipates. A site for the interrogation of the relationship between nature and culture, wilderness and order, freedom and control, and for the gathering of many different species not determined by human will; an active dialogue with living material under the open sky.
2025 screened as part of Dialogues by Sophie Standford (UK)
DIVFUSE Film Archive No.1 with a theme on domesticity.
listening, haptic sensation, time, microcosm
© Sophie Standford