Winterage: Last Milk
Moving image / HD Video / 2022 (21 mins )
Collaboration with AToMR / Mark Jeffery (USA) / Supported by Dance4 (UK) & SAIC (USA) Screenings include: Light Moves Festival, Ireland; Inbetween Time Festival, UK; Fine Arts Festival, NYC, USA; Rencontres International Paris / Berlin; LGBTQ Unbordered International Film Festival (Award Winner), USA; Artists’s Forum Festival, NYC, USA; Sentient Performativities, UK
"Uncanny and unlike anything I’ve experienced before. The film brings so many different agencies together and distributes them (human/nonhuman, physical body, animated body, physical landscape, animated landscape, text, physical sound, mediated sound, song). These are all inseparable from personal/social history, pop cultures and hidden cultures, queer cultures, wild/unbounded space, confined space, climate change..."
Lin Hixson (Every House Has A Door)
Winterage: Last Milk was filmed in three days in rural Derbyshire on the farm where Mark grew up and where his dad suffered a fatal accident - falling from the roof of the milking parlour.
The film takes the very personal, narrative space of memory and filters it through the abstract circulatory systems of language and archaic agricultural systems including the laying of hedges. Hedge-laying is a process whereby a hedge is cut back to its roots and layed horizontally in order to sustain and prolong its lifecycle. This process also results in habitat for wild life and has its own aesthetic traditions, depending on which part of the UK the laying takes place in.
The language that appears in the film was created out of technical and dialect terms for aspects of dairy farming and hedgelaying and borrows generative tropes from systems of coding in order to create new words for feelings and qualities of place that don't yet exist.
Responding to the layers of memory, the image is cut and 'repaired' in a manner reminiscent of 'kintsugi', the japanese art of honuring a repair and embracing its flaws. The image is repaired into a new state which nevertheless acknowledges its loss. Here also the image connects with the kinetic qualities of the wearable sculptures designed by Grace Duval which gesture towards life and death (gold and black) and which usher in their own choreographic qualities as if they were a form of weather.
The performative elements of the film arise from an imaginative ledger of choreographic material which Mark draws upon in relation to rituals acknowledging collective and personal traumas. The specific score that he performs was a singular iteration made for and within the space of the farm.
Whilst we were filming, Covid-19 virus was generating itself and becoming active and we have been editing this film between US and AUS during a long period of lockdown. Inevitably then, its themes of loss and regeneration are inflected by the experiences of this time. If we have a hope, it's that the film gestures towards 'respair' - the word that came to light in 2020 - meaning a return of hope after a period of despair.
Screenings include: Light Moves Festival (work in progress) 2021; Inbetween Time Festival (2021) Sentient Performativities 2022; Rencontres Internationales 2022; SAIC residency exhibition 2022; Artists Forum Film Festival, NYC 2022; Award Winner LGBTQ Unbordered International Film Festival 2022.
Mark and Lucy, with artist, Judd Morrissey & writer & professor, Sara Jane Bailes have given a performative lecture about the film: Talk in the Shape of a Cowlick or a Hedge Lay
article by Maud Lavin for >> Chicago Artist Writers 2022
In 2024 a collaborative chapter entitled conversation in the shape of a cowlick and other tongues with be published in the book Interspecies Performance – a dialogue between practice and scholarship which aims to foreground an intersectional and ethically oriented approach to human-animal collaboration.
Winterage: Last Milk
/ It’s both paen and elegy / It’s an honouring of a life lived / It doesn’t tell a story but instead dreams the stories we carry in us / It’s a remembering of an event none of us here, witnessed / It’s a laying of hedges, it’s a cycle of regeneration / It touches places of loss and mourning / It’s an honouring of the shadow in light and the light in shadow / It’s a portrait of a place and a person through a place / Like a plant its energy comes from light and time / It’s an improvisation with cows and dog and rain and the contours of a cowshed / It’s a staging of transformation through costume and movement / It’s an embodying of the ways in which we are human and more than human, how the edges of us are not sealed and discrete, that energy runs through us and between us / It’s a wondering about the roots of us and the roots of language and how language contains both place & movement / It’s a choreography between sound and image, marinaded in shared cinematic references -
Derek Jarman // Agnes Varda // Powell & Pressberger // Robert Bresson // Frederico Fellini // Maya Deren // Andrei Tarkovsky // Lilian Gish, RIP // Terence Davies // Sally Potter // Claire Denis // Todd Haynes // David Lynch // Apichatpong Weerasethakul // Kelly Reichardt // Chloe Zhao // John Smith // keep showing the glorious way….
How do we understand mortality and labour? Where does a song live in the body? How does the body of a three-year-old who sang ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ to his mother before she left the family home, sing the same song forty-three years later? What does it mean to become a theatre of glitter, dust, sadness and hope?