In The Open | Kayla Parker
Kayla Parker is an Artist film-maker whose research interests centre around subjectivity and place, embodiment and technological mediation, from feminist perspectives, with an interest in the interface between still and moving images, and new materialism. In her practice, she works with film-based and digital technologies to explore the interrelationship between the body and forgotten, liminal spaces. The recipient of many awards, her innovative, experimental moving image artworks are presented around the world, in touring programmes, exhibitions and festivals, with recent presentations at Visualcontainer, Milan, Close-Up Cinema, London, and Aurora Picture Show, Houston. Her latest film, On Location, premiered at Plymouth Arts Centre as part of its Gallery in the Cinema artists’ moving image exhibition programme. It is the initial stage of a practice research project exploring ideas about place, land, and landscape, which seeks to evolve a film-making methodology informed by new materialism and articulate the development of an ‘eco-sensitive cinema’ in the Anthropocene.
A hybrid form of landscape cinema, which observes a year’s cycle of seasonal changes along an unnamed hollow way that forms the stream bed for several springs in a remote area of rural mid-Devon. On Location was made in collaboration with the cinematographer and sound recordist Stuart Moore. We made regular field trips to the site over twelve months, responding intuitively to the place with our cameras and sound equipment. Based on our experience of the meteorological phenomena and the natural world in the sunken lane, we developed experimental filming techniques, such as pinhole cinematography and lenses created from springwater, and made field recordings at the site to capture the sonic architecture of the space.It is the initial phase of a practice research project that responds to Annabel Nicolson’s artist’s book, Escaping Notice (1977), and the hollow way leads to the isolated farmhouse featured in her book.
