We Are All Here
WE ARE ALL HERE emerged out of a commission from artist Eric Fong to write the music to his two films Apparitions and Glass Plate Negatives.
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When Eric introduced me to his source material, I was profoundly moved; a series of portraits of pauper patients, predominantly women, from Victorian mental asylums in Surrey in the late 19th/early 20th Centuries. The original images were captured on glass plate negatives by asylum officials as visual records of the hospitalised patients.
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The patients were given pauper burials in the nearby Horton Cemetery. When the asylums were closed in the 1990s, the medical records, including thousands of glass plate negatives, were abandoned and left to decay in bins and cardboard boxes. Fortunately, they were found and salvaged by an archivist, and are now stored at the Surrey History Centre, Woking.
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Questions around the agency of the women patients, the reasons for their admittance, their eventual fate and the effect on their children and families had a profound effect on me, particularly in the light of my own mother's struggle with depression.
The project is on going in that I wish to explore the arc of that agency, from then until the present day and focusing on the future. I am currently writing a mini opera from this perspective
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WE ARE ALL HERE
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This video is a memorial to my mother, Sheila Mary Lane (1936-2005) and a paen to all those remarkable women (too many to mention in this short film) who have campaigned for, written about and pioneered the arguments for equality, diversity and inclusion. The music is from the album of the same name and features the voices of Nina Kopparhed (soprano) and Jessica Summers (mezzo soprano)
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HARD TO SWALLOW
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In 2019 I moved to the Kent countryside which in many respects it is still very charming, despite some calamitous post WW2 development. What surprised me most was the level of litter, not simply because it disfigures the landscape, but because so much of it is either toxic or harmful to wildlife. Although it is clear that the majority of people take care of their waste responsibly, the numbers of those who don't and the impact it has is critically significant. When, on a site visit in 2024 to Horton Cemetery with artist Eric Fong to scope it out for filming, I was immediately entranced by how nature had so thoroughly reclaimed the land, yet at the same time humans had used it to dump white goods and other toxic waste. In response I made this short film.
This animated short imagines Nature's reaction to the overwhelming scale of waste caused by human consumption. It follows her attempts to reclaim/recycle/reabsorb transmogrify into regurgitating/spewing/retching. Poem 'Fly tipping' written and recited by Tamar Yoseloff
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The Lost Child
A recent commission for an art film exploring a series of images of women patients admitted to Victorian Mental Asylums in Southern England from the late 19th to early 20th centuries raised some, to modern minds, shocking questions around the kinds of behaviours that could lead to women being committed to these institutions. Conditions such as depression, post partum depression and even changes in behaviour during menstral cycles could cause some women to lose their liberty. This film follows a woman as she explores her own neurodivergence in a more contemporary setting.
Don't Tell Me Who I Am
Traces We Leave Behind
When someone very close to us dies, inevitably we may end up sifting through their most personal belongings, which once disposed of, become merely random artifacts that may resurface in vintage, charity or junk shops. These are still traces we leave behind and possibly echo the continuing journey a Soul might take. This film in part touches on my own just such experience after the death of my mother.