Friday 26 December 2014

Garden Art : Rose Lowder's Bouquets

Rose Lowder was an artist with a day job (she now is a professor of art!), editing TV for the BBC, taking the unwanted parts of film, slicing them out and throwing them away, all the stuff that wasn't wanted. Sacks and sacks of stuff.

But then, she took herself and her bicycle to France, and in the spaces around work (more work) filmed flowers and their surroundings, using 16mm filmstrips as a canvas. Flowers and scenery, tourists and weeds, litter and animals all mashed together into one-minute bouquets, shot without continuity, interwoven frames creating a multiple persistence of vision that puts the flowers in their context in space and time. (more on her techniques here)

The films are shot in the camera, during the visit/s, frame by frame or passing and repassing the film back and forth. Constructed in the camera, any frame may occur at any time. The resulting films are like small flowerbombs going off, the familiar 16mm flicker subverted into fast-switches of subjects, often with dappled light, sunshine, wind or water adding its own movement to the melee.

Lightcone have an archive, and you can watch most of the Bouquets online (look out for the blue "play" button next to the film thumbnails) including  Bouquets 21-30, and my personal favourite, Bouquet 5. On her art: "I do less, but try to give it more attention."


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