I used to use 16 millimeter film and I was very interested in its material
limits. It comes in rolls of fixed length and those lengths correspond to time and
experienced 16 millimeter editors used to be able to hold a roll of film in
their hand and know by the weight of it what its duration was. And I'm very
excited by that intertwined relationship between the body and technology. Bridgit
that's showing in the Turner Prize - I shot all on my phone. It becomes very
material, almost sculptural this object my phone. So you can flip it mid shot,
your fingers get in the shot, they're fleshy they're right here when
they're on the screen and you can see the blood inside your finger if you
cover the tiny lens. You touch that and rub the screen to alter the exposure and
if you're filming in a landscape and the wind is pushing the tiny microphone to
its limit,like ripping it. And if you try and do a static shot you see your body
breathing.
The systems of the body are a inmeshed with the camera. It's a kind of
symbiosis but also a kind of grappling, I like that.
I feel very cautious about the term landscape as one thing, like a homogenous
romantic blob, like a forest or a mountain as opposed to cities which are
generally more individuated. People see a shot of a city in a film I feel like
often as an impulse to try to identify that space. Where is that? Is that Paris?
Which cross-section is that? So rather than depicting landscape generically, I
try to foreground subjectivity like in in the form of personal
voiceover to explore landscapes as the distinct individual locations that they are
I was thinking a lot about self-determination when I make Bridgit
and the forms that it might take, both in relation to bodies and to geography. So
for instance, I voted for Scottish independence with its optimism being a
way of opening out of discourse and exchange of self-determination and I was
thinking about the importance of self-determination to histories of
queer struggle and this feels important still now when for example, there's an
encroachment on queer spaces which is in part due to the commodification of a
queer aesthetic in fashion, music and the art world. So by lifting those forms or
aesthetics there's an emptying out of the politics that was originally so important.
For my voiceovers, I often asked friends to read out my own
personal diaristic content; people I feel an affinity with, an affection for
I'm making a matrix to put these seemingly disparate fragments of text
and spoken narrative into. To put them on an equal footing, in dialogue
with one another so that it's less about mapping a linear history of influence or
progress but rather holding these things alongside one another. Fragments of these
histories are enfolded into me, the histories and language of older queer
figures like Samuel Delaney and Sandy Stone and that isn't static its
contingent, it's a constant rolling process of enfolding as I move forward
in my life. I look for them for context and validation and I need them to feel
grounded in who I am