I’m thrilled to be working with Alchemy Film & Arts in Hawick on an artist residency this year, as part of The Teviot, the Flag and the Rich, Rich Soil. The project is funded by Creative Scotland through the Culture Collective and has already led to fantastic community initiatives and artists’ creative work in my old home town. It’s been particularly exciting to meet other artists involved who work around the south of Scotland, including Miwa Nagato-Apthorp, Jessie Growden, Mark Lyken and Julia Parks.
My project is The Big Border Bogle Hunt. I’ll be drawing on my experience of site-specific theatre and interpretation to focus on ways of playfully reactivating Hawick’s community film archives through creative experiments with augmented reality, interactive game formats and communal participation.
So far, I’ve been diving deep into the archives of Hawick Film & Video Group, including the Hawick Pictorials from the 1960s, which have amazing footage of the town’s Teries at work and play. Other gems include the silent comedies of filmmaker Dennis Park, who also directed and acted in his own films. My dad and grandmother were members of HFVG, and it was moving to find traces of them and other familiar townsfolk in the archive, which is held at the group’s atmospheric 30-seater cinema in Croft Road.
Meanwhile, I’ve been researching bogles (the Scots-Northumbrian word for ghost) and scripting an interactive story for a site-specific experience in the town. And learning new skills from the Alchemy team, including rotoscoping and even some light soldering!
Zooming up super-fast is a chance to perform as Rebel Cello at the 13th edition of Alchemy Film Festival, Scotland’s experimental film festival. Rebel Cello is my alter ego for solo performance of spoken word+music+film with looper. All the tales are inspired by the Borders – its histories, quirks and landscapes.