4K film installation. Commissioned by b-side for the b-side multi-media festival 2023
Shown at the Islanders Club, Isle of Portland from 7 – 10 September 2023
Entry is a single channel film installation created in response to the site Brandy Row, a group of tumbledown Tudor cottages overlooking the south coast of England at Chiswell on the Isle of Portland. Built from local stone, these cottages have undergone various structural configurations throughout their history, shaped as much by the powerful forces of nature as by the hands of humans. Early photographs depict a building that is quite different to the one that you can see today, yet throughout time the doorway known as ‘Entry’ has remained a constant threshold to the ebb and flow of community life and the elements.
Working with local company 4DSurveying, we sought to capture a version of the building and its immediate surroundings, at this moment in time, using 3D laser technology to create a ‘digital twin’ of the site. The results are ghost-like, ephemeral images, layers of visual information like huge futuristic 3D engravings that appear to tie the past and present together. We combined this point cloud data, along with photogrammetry of a mirror, local stone and other artefacts, archival imagery and time-lapse footage to create a journey through the site, that looks to the past but also imagines its future in the context of deep geological time.
The mirror from Portland Museum which originally hung in the bedroom of 149 Brandy Row. The archival image on the right shows the house (middle one) during the Great Storm of 1924. Photo: Stuart Morris Collection
The old mirror which had originally hung in the upstairs bedroom of 149 Brandy Row during the Great Storm of 1824 and which is now on display at the Portland Museum, provides the portal for this voyage through time. The pitted silvering of the mirror shows the water line of where the flood waters reached during this terrible storm, when 36 houses in Chiswell were destroyed in less than half an hour with the loss of 25 lives.
The accompanying soundscape was composed around various recordings of the sea at Chesil Beach and West Bay and explores the transient and sometimes dramatic nature of memory and place.
Video and sound ©Heinrich & Palmer
Photo credits for archival imagery in the film: Stuart Morris Collection, Ann Lynham and Penny Piddock
With thanks to Ian Stone, the Portland Museum, Dorset Council, Dr Jeanie Sinclair and the b-side team for their support and help with our research.
