Richard Ashrowan

Lumen

Richard Ashrowan

Sandra Johnston, Alastair MacLennan

A silent exploration of light and gesture, finding the light, losing it, moments of exploration, hesitation and connection.

Index

Richard Ashrowan

An index of the thoughts of a single day, at home in Scotland, in the cold and dark of February.

That Apart

Richard Ashrowan

Sandra Johnston

"The troubles created a generation of escapologists. My generation became experts in the art ofdisappearances and denials followed by ignominious returns. My memory is fatally fractured, it divides and subdivides and disintegrates, but never outgrows its causes." Sandra Johnston. Negotiating personal and historical narratives in relation to sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, "That Apart" extends an ongoing collaboration between performance artist Sandra Johnston and filmmaker Richard Ashrowan. Compiled from a five-day encounter inside a bare gallery at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, a seriesof singular actions and gestures evolve, transitional moves that Johnston describes as an ‘autopsy of performative gestures’ from her 27 years of practice. Performing directly for camera, a solitary, exacerbated relationship to the artist’s body emerges.

Cubiculum Umbrae

Richard Ashrowan

A critique on the presence of cultural tourism in the high Arctic, an experience diminished by the hunger of the camera for fixed images.

Substitute

Richard Ashrowan

A question of daffodils, or representation as substitution, or substitution as representation: a film haunted by what remains unsaid and unseen

Evanescence

Richard Ashrowan

A series of five ‘movements’. Each movement lasts between one and three minutes on a continuous loop. Individual movements can be shown on single or multiple screen systems.

The Rainbow

Richard Ashrowan

An adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), and a personal exploration of memory, the moon, the shadows of things and some psychological aspects of the filmstrip itself – its ‘Luna’ nature and its appetite for light.

Mutus Floris

Richard Ashrowan

Crinan Alexander

Mutus Floris (mute or silent flowers) is composed of over 5000 individual photographs of wild flowers taken over three seasons, at Phenzhopehaugh in Scotland.

Fingal’s Cave

Richard Ashrowan

Filmed in Fingal’s Cave, a dramatic sea cave almost an hour’s journey by sea from the Island of Mull, over the course of seven separate visits. The towering sculpted columnar walls and roof were long held to be man-made, or created by giants, or held up as proof of a divine creator. One myth suggested that the cave was the abode of a nine-headed sea monster, another that the Devil himself were buried beneath the island. The last inhabitants of Staffa, around 1790, left the island after the pot on their stove shook so violently during a storm one night, that they believed “nothing but the devil could have shook it that way.” It can be a wild, moody and inhospitable place.

Twelve Frames Left

Richard Ashrowan

A lament for the utopia of celluloid dreams, dreams of light and color in an almost monochrome world. It is also a lament for political utopia’s in general

Green Man

Richard Ashrowan

A conversation of sorts with an ancient archetype, the vegetative man. The Green Man has been a symbol, a grotesque, a counterpoint, a warning, a celebration, a form of elemental embodiment, since prehistory.

Speculum

Richard Ashrowan

Speculum is a moving image sigil, an attempt at a rehabilitation of the present through the prism of the past. The work explores ancient theories of matter in which luminous emanation gives rise to physical form. Taking the form of seven stages or seven failed experiments, the film draws upon the works of early light philosophers Roger Bacon (1214-1292), Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) and John Dee (1527-1609).