Visual Poetry in Wild Weathers
Maija's first experimental films 2018-2020
Walking, collecting impressions and making art is a magical combination for creating connection with self and nature. In 2018 I started collecting footage on my mobile phone and I made a sequence of experimental films. In 2024 I took a course in Experimental Filmmaking at the Berlin Art Institute and I am reflecting on my back-catalogue as I turn my attention to new experiments.
Untitled, unpublished (2018)
I am reading from my journal, the question and the struggle. A hand flutters down the concertina blind that is diffusing the light, there is a scribble of pain on paper through which the frozen landscape roars by. I wash my drawings in the river. The river is turquoise. I am connected by zoom conversation squares where women's voices speak their hearts to my heart. Amidst summer blaze, I sing wordlessly and spin in the garden, a bedsheet tangling at my feet. Like the paper books I was making using cotton and a needle in the place of words, I have stitched together a series of moments punctuated by changes in direction and location. Time is like a thread and the way the needle passed through the paper; my film pierces through to my underneath.
Wild Mother 2018
9.45 min
I walk the landscape every day, I feel frozen and waterlogged like the ground which sucks at my shoes and creates puddle portals to the sky. I have to trick myself to go out by breaking the task down into simple steps. “Put your coat on.” I am greeted by crow calls. The colours are pale-sky blue and brown. They layer well: dense earth and spacious sky. Water flows in between.
I am coming into a new relationship with the element of water; with emotion in motion, and the archetypal feminine. With the presence of the ‘wild mother’ (an antidote to what Clarissa Estes calls the ‘too good' mother) I attempt to stir an ‘inner world’ with moving images. I feel like I am collaborating with the weather.
This film is intended to be played on a repeating loop so that you can come into the cycle at any time. Hands wring; and flutter; and grasp. Branches scrabble. Mud sticks. Boots crunch over precarious ice and a voice sings through the yew tree. Poems are spoken over some of the imagery.
‘Wild Mother’ was exhibited at the first CAS Associate Artist group exhibition In The Round (2018) alongside a self-published poetry book Paper-clips with Raven. If you’d like a copy of Paper-clips with Raven featuring film stills and poetry for £14.99 please contact me to complete your order and receive a copy of the accompanying film. At the time of writing I have just 4 copies left.
Alternative Lore (2019)
Sunlight in the dark. A woman dancing between smoke and shadow and sky. On the surface of my vision, a ripple of raindrops and the veiled brightness of dark flame. With a crown on fire, the matchstick girl is fleeing through a frigid landscape looking for deeper nourishment beyond fear. Do not presume to heal me she she says, I am finding my way, and there is spiders in the well. Alternative Lore was exhibited at SPUDworks as part of Let Us Dissent 2019.
Zeitgeist Non Grata (2019)
17.24 min
This film was made during an experimental artist residency Laboratory of Dissent 2 (Inside/Outside) and exhibited at Winchester Gallery.
I made a wig out of strips of paper with writing on to represent my inner Rapunzle trapped in her tower. In my version, Rapunzle has shaved her head and trailed parchment out the window.
Artist Sarah Misselbrook was following the project blog and I knew she had shaved her head in the past, so I asked her to play a word game with me. “I shaved my head because…“, “I shaved my head because…”. What emerged was conversational poetry. We two artists wrote messages to one another on Whatsapp at 8.30am every morning for a week. Later, we read the words aloud.
The audio is laid over my moving images without any editing whatsoever, allowing the transitions up to chance. The moving images repeat until the audio is finished, allowing repetitions and new layers of meaning to emerge.
Transmutation 14:44 (2020)
14.44min (gallery version 15min)
This film is made like the others but this time I omit words entirely and let the images be poems in their own right. In some ways this feels like a documentary more than the rest, but only because it contains clips from a whole year and includes footage from experiments undertaken during Laboratory of Dissent 2 (Inside/Outside 2019).
My elemental and layered film ‘Transmutation’ invites you to experience the balancing of opposites and contrasts as an expression of human whole-ing, self awareness and creative transformation.
The concept was to contrast the elements found in nature: earth, water, air and fire. Ever since making this film I cannot stop seeing how the weather only becomes visible at the boundary where one element is touching another. Wind on water. Fire in air. It is a meditation on the creative tension of contrasts, but extending it also to relational differences and intra-actions between any combination of "others".
Transmutation 14:44 was exhibited at Chapel Arts Studios as part of Tony Spencer’s ‘Nothing Is Immediate’ (2021) and again at Lacuna Festivals (2023). Its companion workshop ‘Elemental Self Expression’ is a creative writing workshop I really enjoy facilitating.
I don’t know if these notes were interesting or not, let me know. It was certainly useful to see what I was looking at in my first foray into moving imagery and to reflect on where I might go next.
Relevant posts you might like:
What I’m reading at the moment:
Tender Maps by Alice Maddicott
P.S. The titles of the films are mostly click-able so you can click through and watch the ones that are available online.
