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Films

I am making digital films as part of my exploration of ways to articulate the subject of pain in relation to the Viking Energy Wind Farm (VEWF) in Shetland, UK.  

 

 

With some of these films I want to show the passing of time, and consequently some of them are very slow, i.e. two hours. Animation also enables me to speed up time, and thus I am experimenting with making gifs as a way to show the army of vehicles that has invaded our landscape. I will add films as I complete them.  It is turning out to be a slow process.​

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The landscape in Shetland is in a constant state of injury, wounding and destruction as a result of the construction of this wind farm. As with my digital drawings on photographs, I am  using film to explore the wind farm construction as a metaphor for the body in pain, scarring, and wounding, both physically and emotionally.

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Landscape in Pain #164615072023
 

This film is a short version of a film I originally made in summer 2023. I made it after the wind turbines started to be installed on the Viking Energy Wind Farm in Shetland. While making this film I was thinking of the idea that the Viking Energy Wind Farm is the 21st century clearances as it will result in the depopulation of the area, eventually leaving no population in the vicinity of the turbines. 75% of the wind turbines are within the 2km recommended minimum distance from homes. It is even more disturbing when you consider that many homes, in fact the majority, within this 2 km zone are within 2km of multiple turbines. 

Windlins, 2023

This film is different from my work for the project Landscape in Pain.  I made it for another collaborative project, Living in the Landscape, which used the theme of the forest. As Shetland doesn't have a forest culture, I thought about the idea of forest in relation to the Viking Energy Wind Farm. I was struck by the news that by mid-2023 nearly 16 million trees had been felled in Scotland for the construction of wind farms, so it is because there is this connection to wind farms that I've decided to share it here.

 

The word windling (Scots dialect) or windlin in the Shetlaen language embodies ideas of both loss and renewal. A windlin is a bundle of grasses, a sign of both end and beginning, of hope and renewal, as the hay has been harvested and then secured in a bundle for new, productive use.

 

Windling  can also mean something that is torn off by the wind, which I think of as being lost to the wind. I link this idea to the sense of loss we are experiencing in Shetland where, paradoxically, the construction of an industrial scale wind farm has opened the doors to large corporations who are aggressively extracting our natural wind resource for shareholders’ profit. We are witnessing widespread loss of wildlife, with species made extinct by the construction process; impact on individual health and well being; damage to our community; cultural heritage and sense of place.

Landscape in pain #046320201113
Photo: Courtesy Sustainable Shetland

This film is a very short version of one of the films in Landscape in Pain, a collection of digital drawings and films. The original film is almost two hours long. 

Anunder, 2024

Anunder is the second film I made as part of the Living in the Landscape research project which focussed on theme of rivers and energy. The fieldwork took place in Finland, in Finnish Lapland. It explores the beauty of water, whether river, loch, burn or sea, while simultaneously attempting to interrogate what lies hidden beneath the surface of large scale industrial developments instigated by the energy industries, including in Shetland where the landscape lies in a constant state of injury following the construction of the Viking Energy Wind Farm, a massive industrial scale development of 103 wind turbines.  The wind farm has contaminated waters and polluted the land.  Life has been lost.  Fish have disappeared.  Invisible storms of microplastics shower land and sea. Noise, infrasound and flicker unremittingly erode wellbeing.  Shetland of course is not alone.  Other small communities in the northern and Arctic region are similarly sabotaged by the energy industries.  Accounts of villages drowned by the Porttipahta Reservoir created through hydropower expansion in Lapland resonate deeply with my fears for the imminent disappearance of communities in Shetland.  Horror lingers beneath the surface.  

Suffocation.  

Disempowerment.  

Displacement.  

Loss.

Transmission, 2025

This film was made for the international TELEPHONE project, which is based on the idea of the Chinese Whispers game. I made this very short film in response to work that I received by a creative practitioner, who I don’t yet know they are or where they are located in the world because the project hasn’t yet been completed.

 

Their work resonated strongly with Landscape in Pain, my personal response to the construction of the industrial scale Viking Energy Wind Farm on Shetland, where I live and work. The idea of 'transmission' can be widely interpreted. In this film I see the wind turbine as a metaphor for the many complexities embedded in ‘transmission’ from the very personal to the wider implications for whole communities, and the human and more than human. 

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