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| Gravelly Hill Interchange, Birmingham, November 2014 |
At various intervals in
recent months, I’ve alluded to my long hours spent out in the field with my
video camera. Indeed, for a period,
through the coldest, wettest period of 2014, it felt like I was out most
evenings and weekends, - allowing my camera to maintain a steady gaze at
numerous bits of concrete, and generally overlooked urban corners throughout
the Midlands. Luckily, a good selection
of such sites are readily available close to my home in Leicester, but my
forays also found me in Birmingham, Nottingham and Rugby, at various junctures,
(and junctions).
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| Still From:Andrew Smith & Hugh Marwood, 'Orfeo', Digital Video, 2015 |
The aim was to collect
sufficient source footage for the film collaboration that Andrew Smith and I
had agreed should be part of our ‘Mental
Mapping’ exhibition at Rugby Art Gallery & Museum. The opening of the exhibition feels like a
good time to finally reveal the finished product here. I’ve also included a few still shots taken in
the same locations as the filming took place.
In fact, ‘Orfeo’ has been viewable on YouTube for a while, but I’ve deliberately held back from too loud a fanfare until now, having being one of those children who always liked to save up all my Christmas presents till the last moment - then open them all at once.
I shot the footage with no
specific agenda, other than to maintain some connection with concrete or cement
wherever possible, and to stick to those typically mundane, overlooked, or
down-at-heel locations in which I can gauge a city’s pulse whilst feeling
strangely separated from it at the same time.
These are the kind of places where a particularly contemplative kind of
ambience often collects in deep pools, or where most people pass by so
unheedingly as to forget that they are places at all. Maintaining the concrete theme reflects my
abiding fascination with its material and symbolic qualities, but also,
tangentially, the impact made on me by the enormous cement plant that dominates
the town where we planned to exhibit.
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| Cemex Cement Plant, Rugby, Warwickshire, December 2014 |
Around Christmas time, I
handed over a brick-sized hard-drive full of such material to Andrew, and
returned to my ‘Map’ paintings, - also
intended for the same exhibition. I was
delighted to find, a few weeks later, that not only had he devised a script
around various passages of my filming, but had begun editing it into some kind
of coherent artifact. He asked me to
return to the fray to collect certain specific images, but this was very much a
case of just filling in a few small gaps, and still largely a matter of
interpretation, (with the instigation reversed).
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| Still From: Andrew Smith & Hugh Marwood, 'Orfeo', Digital Video, 2015 |
The final results are everything I could have hoped for from the collaboration, and more. My hope was always that working at a remove from each other, and with no little trust in the other to pull something out of the fire, would open doors that neither of us might have opened if left to our own devices. It was a leap of faith, but one that has paid off from my point of view, without a doubt. Andrew’s well-read literary background, and the fact that he is an inventive writer in his own right, meant that something open-endedly focused on the resonance of place, ultimately morphed into a surreal, absurdist narrative of strange, implied events and perplexing associations.
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| West Leicester, April 2015 |
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| Aston, Birmingham, April 2015 |
If I’m mostly about the
reveries that arise from immersing myself in physical geography, I sense that
Andrew is as much involved with concocting less-easily chartable landscapes of
the mind from within, generally speaking.
As I always suspected, he was able to generate the kind of oblique,
allusive narrative, full of clues - but short on definitive meanings, to which
I am always drawn, but less likely to generate for myself.
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| Still From: Andrew Smith & Hugh Marwood, 'Orfeo', Digital Video, 2015 |
For what it’s worth, I know that Andrew drew partially on the ideas outlined in Kevin Lynch’s ‘The Image Of The City’ [1], which also exerted a strong influence on my ‘Cement Cycle’ photographs. Without wanting to make over-grandiose claims, I also detect hints of the non-specific post ‘event’ sensibility of Tarkovski’s ‘Stalker’ [2.]. As the title suggests, there’s an implication of the Orpheus myth in the way that the film emerges from subterranean obscurity into the light. For a while, I even imagined it under the fatuous working title of ‘Orpheus in the Underpass’.
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| West Leicester, December 2014 |
Anyway, I’ll let you judge the
film’s potential meanings for yourselves, along with its merits, (or
otherwise). Should you criticise it for
being pretentious or self-consciously obscure, I’d ask, “…and
your problem with that is - what, exactly?”
To those who may criticise my
exposure settings or inept camera work, I can only apologise and offer to try
harder next time. I certainly intend
that there will be a next time…
‘Mental Mapping: New Work by Andrew Smith & Hugh Marwood’, runs from 8 – 18 June 2015, at Floor OneGallery, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum, Little Elborow Street, Rugby,
Warwickshire, CV21 3BZ. I’ll be
reporting on the exhibition itself very soon.
Both Andrew and I would like to thank Paul Ray for his technical assistance at the editing and final production stages of 'Orfeo'.
Both Andrew and I would like to thank Paul Ray for his technical assistance at the editing and final production stages of 'Orfeo'.
[1.]: Kevin Lynch, 'The Image Of The City', Cambridge Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 1960
[2.]: Andrei Tarkovsky (Dir.), 'Stalker', Mosfilm, USSR, 1979
[2.]: Andrei Tarkovsky (Dir.), 'Stalker', Mosfilm, USSR, 1979
