41/42 Group Show

Group show at 41/42, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, Cornwall.

Films by:
Kersti Jan Werdal (Los Angeles, USA)
Bryony Gillard (Bristol, UK)
Vicki Thornton (London, UK)
L.I.E & Barry Sykes (Cornwall & London, UK)

Kersti Jan Werdal
Tin, Water, Red Earth
Digital HD, colour, sound, 26min 49sec, 2017
This documentary is about the maiolica ceramic folk-art tradition in a coastal town south of Naples called Vietri sul Mare. All studio observation was shot in Ceramica Pinto, a company owned by the Pinto family that has sustained for over 150 years. The film explores themes of memory, fetishization of the object, tradition, mythology, the act of looking, and the unbreakable connection between the people of Vietri and the natural geography they inhabit. Moments in daily life are captured and edited into a montage that brings the viewer closer to the people and place it conveys.

Bryony Gillard
Unctuous Between Fingers
HD video, colour, sound, 15min, 2019
Unctuous Between Fingers takes as its starting point, an archive of pressed seaweeds and algaes held by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, collected predominantly by women in the mid 1800’s. A gendered hobby, ‘seaweeding’ was considered a creative pastime of little importance. However, many of the collectors made a significant contribution to marine botany, meticulously recording specimens and sharing their findings generously with the (male) scientific community.

Through a process of archival research and workshops with enthusiasts, artists, scientists and philosophers, the work explores the seaweed collection’s relationship to contemporary ideas and conversations. Considering our interconnectedness with our more-than-human world, the work poses the question, what we can learn from seaweed?

Vicki Thornton
Symfoniya
Two screen HD video: 4min 10sec, looped (main screen) & 41sec, looped (small screen), 2018
Symfonia was shot at the ‘Muscle Beach’ outdoor gym in the Hydropark area of Kyiv, Ukraine and in Bilozerske music school in the Donbas coal mining region of eastern Ukraine. It explores notions of masculinity and its relationship to performance via references to Soviet films such as Dziga Vertov’s 'Enthusiasm (Symphony of the Donbas)', 1930.

L.I.E & Barry Sykes
Still Busy
Digital, colour, sound, 9min 11sec, 2013
The title references the legend of Ben Nicholson, as told by the Art Historian James Fox. Shot on location in St Ives in the winter of 2012, the film questions ideas of legacy, art tourism, counter shamanism and Country & Western tunes.

• http://www.4142.co.uk/2020/02/group-show...