Jessica Sarah Rinland
2021Black Pond
Jessica Sarah Rinland
Artist-filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland presents Black Pond, a film that explores the activity within a common land in the south of England. Previously occupied by the 17th century agrarian socialists The Diggers, the land is currently inhabited by a Natural History Society whose occupations include bat and moth trapping, mycology, tree measuring and botanical walks. After two years of filming on the land, the footage was shown to the members of the Society. Their memories and responses were recorded and subsequently used as part of the film’s narration. The film does not offer a comprehensive record of the history of humans within the area. Instead, it explores more intimately, human’s relationship with and within land and nature.
Black Pond
Sol de Campinas
Jessica Sarah Rinland
Fernando Ferreira, Eduardo Neves
Sol de Campinas traces the work of archaeologists who, for the past ten years, have been excavating a ring of mounds surrounding a central plaza within a territory currently known as the State of Acre, Brazil. They transition from field to laboratory, interpreting how the land was constructed, what patterns were employed in settlement land use, and the composition of the anthropogenic earth that remains.
Sol de Campinas
Electric Oil
Jessica Sarah Rinland
Alina Reitz
In 1868, Laura Jernegan, a 6 year old girl from Massachusetts, USA set out on a three year whaling voyage to the Pacific Ocean. During this voyage, Laura wrote a journal about her life on the whaling ship. She mainly notes banal daily events, but regularly describes the slaughter of whales in great detail.
Electric Oil
We Account the Whale Immortal
Jessica Sarah Rinland
The whale forever exists, like utopia, as a parable, a myth, and a nightmare – caught between the wide open ocean and our two-dimensional confinement, between reality and imagination. We Account the Whale Immortal, an ever-changing film and a one off performance, explores the arrival of three mythic whales in the Thames, from the 17th to the 21st century, as evocative emblems of utopian intent.
We Account the Whale Immortal
The Flight of an Ostrich (Schools Interior)
Jessica Sarah Rinland
Birds are masters of the sky. The ostrich is incapable of doing the one thing birds are famous for – they cannot fly. They compensate their impotence by having the largest eyes and by being the fastest birds on land, seldom caught by predators. Schools Interior: The Flight of an Ostrich links this description of the ostrich to a moment during the life of a chin-down, shy eight-year-old girl who, while watching an educational video about ostriches, grasps an opportunity and flies in the face of her peer group.
The Flight of an Ostrich (Schools Interior)
Like Lust
Jessica Sarah Rinland
The film uses natural history footage—human desire, spermatozoa, even cellular division—and sensual contemporary shots to dazzling effect. Is it mitosis or meiosis going on in there? Hard to tell, but either way, reproduction is a theme entirely at one with the band’s carnal sound.
Like Lust
The Blind Labourer
Jessica Sarah Rinland
Jessica Sarah Rinland
The Blind Labourer examines the similarities and contrasts within the whaling and lumber industry. It edits together archive footage of labourers in the forests, at sea and in factories, felling trees, cutting whales and developing their multiple products for society and scientific studies.
The Blind Labourer
Description of a Struggle
Jessica Sarah Rinland
" It must wait until the breath voluntarily leaves its body, even though it sometimes gazes at me with a look of human understanding, challenging me to do the thing of which both of us are thinking. " - Description of a Struggle: Franz Kafka
Description of a Struggle
