Artist Moving Image programme for the Ocean exhibition

Filmed on location in and around New Plymouth, New Zealand and Plymouth, England.   

The sea holds us together.    

A powerful, moving record of the thoughts and voices of women from coastal, immigrant and creative communities. The resulting film considers how connection is made and unmade by inclusion and exclusion, the potency of cultural and natural objects like the conch shell and the damaging effects of suppressing language and culture. It asks the question: What does it mean to be a ‘good ancestor’? 

Jill Impey, is an English artist with a socially engaged practice. She is a neurodivergent thinker, working with mixed media and audiovisual installation. Her background in BA (Hons) Textile Design, MA Fine Art and Lecturing in Art and Design (Further Education) has led to a creative process that explores connection and communication of our relationships with nature, culture and each other. A founder of Participate Contemporary Artspace CIC, and re:collect, artist collaborations in Shropshire, U.K., Impey’s body of participatory and audio visual projects, support funded by Arts Council England and National Trust includes beinghumanproject2012, The Elephant in the Room Conversations, The Beat of the Butterflies’ Wings and The Weather Report. Impey’s lived experience of neurodivergence as a woman, artist and educator informs her interest in inclusion. Her practice sheds light on aspects of mental health, connection and decolonisation. She has worked with diverse groups from, AGE UK, schools in deprived areas of Plymouth, HMP Leicester, FE colleges in Walsall, Wolverhampton and Shrewsbury, Groups of Māori, and European Heritage women in Raglan and Kawhia, New Zealand, alongside museums and art galleries. Participant voice forms the basis of her audiovisual artworks, assisting the communication of her own neurodivergent voice. Her engagement workshops are often performative, ‘in costume’ events, offering a lightness, to what can be difficult subject matter. Working with natural and cultural objects, she invites curiosity and a deeper understanding of nature, heritage and inclusion. 

Mat Chivers, 2018, 11 min looped single channel video installation. 

For a period of time a spoken narrative is heard with the screen in blackness, then an image snaps sharply into view. Framed at centre is the Phare de Haut-Fond Prince – an isolated lighthouse built on a notorious reef, 7 kilometres off the coast of Tadoussac, Québec. The sun drops behind the mountains of the Côte Nord in the distance, as the camera makes one single turn around the iconic structure 

Over the course of the film, the narrator invokes a vision that spans the range of the human sensorial body - recounting physical experiences of sound, sight, taste, scent and touch. The spoken words locate a woman and a man in the lighthouse seen onscreen. In an altered state of consciousness, they engage in a compulsive act of making as a way to understand what it is to be human – actively re-shaping their neurology in the process. 

Lighthouses facilitate safe navigation by warning voyagers of hazards ahead – they are reminders that we should proceed with full attention. Maybe what is most interesting about this moment of unprecedented technological change and evolutionary shift is the potential that it offers us to consider what it is about being human that we value. 

The work of British visual artist Mat Chivers looks at some of the fundamental phenomena that drive our thoughts and actions. He explores ideas relating to perception, cognition, evolutionary process, ecology and ethics by bringing traditional analogue approaches to making into counterpoint with state-of-the-art digital technologies. His practice in sculpture, drawing, film and performance often involves close collaborations with individuals and institutions in the fields of science, technology and academia. Chivers' work is based on in-depth research and a response to place, to articulate some of the wider relationships that we all share and on which we all depend.