
Sadly this isn’t a blog to announce the birth of an elephant, rather an Alan Patridge inflected opening gambit. But who wouldn’t want to make such an announcement? Apparently a baby elephant or calf is carried in utero for 18-22 months, which coincidently is around the same time it takes me to clock that my blog is looking sad and untended. You may have noticed a lot has happened in that time but I won’t mention any of that ephemera – pandemics, brexit, etc – as this blog is about me, me, me. Or rather the bits of me that aren’t tending to various corporeal functions, sleeping, eating etc ie the products of my labour.
Please stop here if you are triggered by self-aggrandising, boasting and general self promoting nonsense. If you choose to continue please mindful that this post omits negative life experiences, financial struggles, ailments etc in the interests of projecting productive and creative engagement across multiple art forms with the aim of securing further projects.

Like you I left the normal, prepandemic, world just at the point that Alasdair Gray physically departed this plane of existence (not that he would have had much truck with anything that smacked of new age, although I’m guessing, neither would he have been so conceited as to say he had all the answers). Thats an aside but if you are a freelancer the pandemic would have had a special kind of terror in that you will have perceived no possible way in which you could generate an income, but it turns out, for me anyway, it was all ok. Phew. I even discovered things right under my nose that I didn’t even really know I had – like a shed. I did know I had a shed obvs, but I didn’t know I could change my mobile plan so that it worked for wifi and hey ho I had an office, of sorts. A leaky office, but an office non the less.
I was fortunate that I had a couple of big projects to occupy myself. A time capsule for Paisley Town Hall – for which I was the only applicant! The idea for the project started out as a book with various chapters which would accommodate different voices (the Gray afficinado’s will note a direct steal (homage to) in the video above). Although the chapter idea remained I hit on the idea of a scroll on a bobbin, which tied into the idea of the townhall being built on the site of the first bobbin’s production – a huge big deal which laid the groundwork for the sewing machine and from this (stick with me here) cinema (google “intermittent mechanism” if that sounds a bit tenuous).

I also was a beneficiary of a VACMA development grant, organised by the wonderful Kate Drummond (sadly now departed from Renfrewshire for pastures new), of which there were many applicants. The grant was not a lot of money and mainly to travel and research a proposed installation around children’s tv in the 70’s. Although I couldn’t travel (I was in discussion with Yoffy of Fingerbobs fame who was going to be visiting family in London) I could do research and shoot some sequences and even order some materials to start playing around with a finger bob or two. Being high minded of course the project wasn’t (isn’t) so much about children’t tv but about nostalgia and the context which produced children’s tv: industrial relations in the early 70’s, the rise of attachment theory, perceptions of audiences and class from within the “Institutional State Apparatus”. Hell to clarify my understanding of the Institutional State Apparatus, I even bought a book about Althusser although I struggled to read it.

Although this project is in limbo (a less comforting notion from my childhood than finger bobs) it did rekindle an interest in showing films in odd places. This rather usefully tied into to another big project I have recently completed called Sightlines.
Sightlines was a response to a call for outdoor commissions sent out by Renfrewshire Leisure. The brief was for events/artworks that would be part of a proposed Cycle Arts Festival (a little aside here, the cycle arts festival was my idea…about 3 years ago at a visioning event in Johnstone Town Hall). Like everyone in lockdown I had been wandering further afield and without particular purpose. On one occasion I did go for a walk specifically to find an ice house that I knew existed but had little idea of where it was. I found it, along with an ornamental cave which had had various functions attributed to it. On seeing it I realised that this would be a perfect place for a film installation.
So when the call for outdoor commissions came up I saw there was perfect synchronicity around an idea based on peoples experience of gardening in the pandemic, and perhaps more importantly the history of Parkhill Woods, the gardens designed by a self styled Colonel McDowall.
McDowell was an apprentice overseer on a plantation in the West Indies and went onto become one of the richest commoners in scotland. He generated his income from enslaving people, a fact that couldn’t be avoided in any project that looks to think about how this dreadful legacy still shapes our environment. I won’t preempt the content of the film, but clearly this made for powerful material to shape into something that reflected on, amongst other things, the nature of trauma, the trauma of nature and lots of other things besides.
Alongside grappling with the content of the film and form of it’s delivery there were a number of not insignificant technical hurdles to overcome as well as some environmental concerns including a couple of bat surveys to ensure the work wouldn’t encroach on their habitat. Fortunately there is a local batman, Davy Whyte who turned up with his son Robin, to certify that it was not a bat cave. There was also the issue of what technology would allow for a projection to run for over four hours off grid. After much quizzing of many people and research into potential back projection materials I hit upon hardware solutions which were incredibly expensive and crucially, hinged on a hand mirror for £2 sourced from the local charity shop.
I’ve screened Sightlines twice now with support from Muriel Ann Macleod from Renfrewshire Leisure. I’ve also been there for all the screenings and have got a lot from the feedback of visitors. These have ranged from the unexpectedly hostile – one person was very agitated and concerned that Lochwinnoch would be subject to Black Lives Matter protests; to the visceral – one of the last viewers was overcome with emotion and started weeping. I think over the 5 days it was shown there was near enough 200 visitors to the event which surprised me as it is a good 30 minute walk to the site from the nearest car park.






As well as doing these projects I have still managed to keep a foothold in participative and education type work. Stop/Start was my first taste of running animation workshops online. This was a workshop over six weeks with young people from PACE, organised by Remode and funded by Paisley’s Sma’ Shot Festival. As well as working with me on the visuals, another group worked with two local musicians to create a soundtrack. I was highly sceptical of how the project would run initially when it was proposed in March 2020 at the beginning of lockdown. I needn’t have worried, the project was a big success and went onto win best animation and best film in the U18’s section at the Scottish Youth Film Festival that year. I’ve recently started working with The National Deaf Children’s Society on remote workshops, although we’re hopeful we can take the workshops in person in the autumn.
I also went back into education myself, on Queen Margaret University’s and Screen Scotland’s course in Professional Practice in Film Education. This was a catapulting back into a world of film theory that was at once familiar yet startling different. The course was a mix of teachers delivering media studies and filmmakers who find themselves delivering education work. It was challenging on a number of fronts, not least the sometimes 4 hour long lectures and seminars delivered on a Saturday morning on zoom (the best thing I can say about zoom is that it’s not teams). Anyway, and I’m still figuring out how to drop this into casual conversation, to complete the course I had to deliver a lesson plan for a 20 hour project and a reflective essay, for which I received a mark of 80%. An MA level essay, 80%! Following on from an undergrad course where I barely scrapped 60% on essays I was blown away, especially with the nice comments I received about the work: “This is a brilliant bit of work. It really gets to the heart of what reflective writing should be about: honest, thoughtful and critical in the right ways.” I also managed to jimmy in an Althusser joke.
There have been lots of other ventures over the past 18 months, sadly none involving elephants. I developed on an online seminar for The Renfrewshire Mental Health Arts festival alongside the Paisley chapter of U3A, The University of Southhampton and Richard Weeks of Renfrewshire Leisure, who I’d previously worked with on a project around home movies (this exists as a fragmentary feature length film which I suspect will never see the light of day nor the darkness of a screening). The University of Southhampton has a department of nostalgia, rather like something from a novel by one of my favourite writers Ismail Kadare, and Professor Tim Wildschut gave an excellent intro to this.

Finally I should also mention that I managed to do some in person work in the form of workshops in Gigha Primary School, wherein I had a couple of days off the mainland and helped the whole school (all ten of them) make a series of little films that hopefully sparked some interest in filmmaking. Courtesy of the Gigha island trust they also have some tech to help them make the most of their iPads.
Oh and if you’ve got this far…at the beginning of lockdown a number or projects came to a close.
…and I also done some stuff for free..just to keep my hand in etc
And as a final final, I’ve also started making a longer film….which hopefully etc etc
Thats enough about me, me, me! Until 2023 etc etc….