México, 2024
12:30 min
Colour, sound, digital file

In Santa María Tlahuitoltepec, Oaxaca, the women’s organization Poj Kaa maintains a community herbarium. Foraging for plants is a way to share knowledge with grandmothers, midwives, healers and shamans. In Teotitlán del Valle the Ruiz family makes their own journey in search of colors, which they find inside plants and insects that are used to dye the wool with which they weave rugs. Both practices involve exploring the territory, recognizing it, naming it and relating to everything in it.

Elena Pardo is a maker, explorer, and promoter of the moving image. She has developed her practice around experimental cinema, combining the making of documentaries, performance and expanded cinema, and animation. Pardo is also the co-founder of the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine (LEC), a space dedicated to the education and production of experimental and expanded cinema. She collaborates with independent film education projects like Campamento Audiovisual Itinerante (CAI) and JEQO, and is currently a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores grant.

28 minutes, captioned version
16mm film digitised as 2K with text animation in HD
Contains flashing imagery
Written, directed and edited by Sarah Browne
Music: David Donohoe
Camera: Helena Monteiro Gouveia, Sarah Browne
Voice: Elaine Lillian Joseph
Field recording and sound design: David Donohoe
Captioning: Daniel Hughes
Colour grade: Michael Higgins

Buttercup combines memoir with formal experiment. The film revolves around a single photograph depicting a child wearing a Communion dress, standing beside a man and a cow in a field. Returning to the farm where it was made, the photograph is described and referred to repeatedly throughout the film. These descriptions of still and barely-moving images prompt thoughts on human and bovine domestication, and the entanglements of gender, disability, and wildness. Buttercup is made in close collaboration with audio describer Elaine Lillian Joseph and composer David Donohoe.

A printed publication (pictured below) designed by Rose Nordin and produced by Kunstverein Aughrim was available for order here and it is now sold out.
‍‍An audio recording by Sarah Hayden can be listened to on her website (20 minutes). The audio recording is accompanied by a reference document, which contains the text of the unspoken footnotes and sources cited. A word document accessible for use by screen readers is also available to download.

Audio-described version for Blind and partially sighted visitors (headphones recommended) is available here.

Sarah Browne is an artist based in Ireland concerned with spoken and unspoken, bodily experiences of knowledge, labour and justice. Her practice involves sculpture, film, performance and public projects, often in collaboration with others. Recent solo projects include Buttercup (2024, solo exhibition at Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh); Echo’s Bones (2022: a collaborative film-making project with autistic young people in North Dublin, responding to the work of Samuel Beckett); Public feeling (2019: public art commission in South Dublin leisure centres); Report to an Academy, Marabouparken, Stockholm (2017), Hand to Mouth at CCA Derry~Londonderry & Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and The Invisible Limb, basis, Frankfurt (both 2014). In 2020 she curated TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Galway, with a project titled The Law is a White Dog. Significant group exhibitions Browne has participated in include Bergen Assembly: Actually, the Dead are Not Dead (2019) and the Liverpool Biennial, with Jesse Jones (2016). In 2009 Sarah Browne co-represented Ireland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with Gareth Kennedy and Kennedy Browne, their shared collaborative practice. She is associate artist with University College Dublin College of Social Sciences and Law.

Paint on glass animation
1:37 minutes
Colour, silent, digital file

“The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time — the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.” – Derek Jarman, Modern Nature.

Laura McMorrow is a visual artist from Leitrim. She holds a Masters in Fine art from the University of Ulster in Belfast (2012) and she graduated with a degree in painting from Limerick School of Art and Design (2008). Her practice incorporates video installation, animation, sculpture, collage, and painting. In her moving image work, Laura draws on the aesthetics of science fiction and the history of lo-fi cinema techniques. She uses unusual materials to invent a world where the familiar becomes strange. Her work is otherworldly, dreamlike and subtly humorous.

Recent solo exhibitions include The Gardener Digs at The Dock and at the Royal Hibernian Academy, and The Lost Acre at Leitrim Sculpture Centre. Recent community art projects include a collaborative animation project with teenagers funded by Creative Ireland and a sensory mapping project with Leitrim Cycling Festival.

McMorrow is part of the ^ collective, who run an artist-led studio and experimental space in Manorhamilton, Leitrim. Her studio is currently based in the collective space. In 2023, the collective worked together on a collaborative project called Waking the Land that considered environmental grief, supported by the Irish Hospice Foundation.

Garden Pieces by Margaret Tait
1998, UK, 12 mins, Colour, Sound, 4:3
A triptych of contrasting moods. Margaret Tait’s last film is a vibrant live-action and hand-drawn garden portrait.

Fleurs Sans Titre by Miles McKane
2002 / Super 8 / color / silent / 1 screen / 3 mins
The film was shot as a single S.8 roll in the iris garden of the Casa Maure, and in a field of Normandy. The light filtering through the petals,[ which act as a sort of screen,] both illuminate matter and reveal the structure of the plant. In the first part of the work was shot mostly in macro, so prepulsing one’s vision into the luminous molecules that make up living things. A sort of bees eye view of the world. Gradually the spacialisation changes to one of an open landscape, and a field of buttercups. Beyond the vision of flowers and vegetation the work is a meditation on our place in the structure of the cosmos and order of things. Do we have a macro vision of our self and context, are we microscopes, with an incomplete view and as ephemeral as a petal.

Bloemschikken By Francien Van Everdingen
1999 / 16mm / Color / Silent / 1 Screen / 3 mins
A Bouquet Of Flowers, Bathing In Splendid Colors And Dark Loneliness.

Ofrenda by Claudio CALDINI
1978 / Super 8 / color / sound / 1 screen / 2′ 23 mins
A moment of devotion expressed by intense speed of variation in contrast to the fragility of the motive. The continuity of shapes and light produces a choreographic illusion.

Sources by Rose Lowder
2012 / 16mm / color / sound / 1 screen / 5′ 22 mins
Sources originated from Thomas the Gardener’s wish to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his making vegetable pâté. Leaving urban life behind him in order to renew a relationship with the land, Thomas started up an organic garden in the beautiful area of hot and cold Springs, lakes and rivers, in the upper Aude Valley. In the middle of making his pâté, the gardener is surrounded, as the water sources of the Aude river rush by, by one of the sources for his recipes, the flowers and spices from his garden. Music by Alexis Degrenier.

Landfill 16 by Jennifer REEVES
2010-2011 / 16mm / color-b&w / sound / 1 screen / 9′ 00 mins
Exhumed 16mm film from my own “landfill” in Indiana, constitutes the canvas of Landfill 16. After finishing my double-projection When it was Blue I was horrified by the bulk of outtakes that would normally end up in a landfill. So I temporarily buried the footage to let enzymes in the soil begin to decompose the image, and later I hand-painted that film to give it new life. Within this pulsating, abstract moving painting I attempt to express my dread of man-made waste. This “recycling” is a meditation on nature’s losing battle to decompose relics of our abandoned technologies and productions.

Glimpse of the Garden by Marie MENKEN
1957 / color / sound / 1 screen / 4′ 00 mins
Glimpse of the Garden is a simple, unassuming observational film. In this brief film, Marie Menken carefully probes the layers of a lush garden, shifting from the macro to the micro and then back again. She collages together images that nudge into the hidden details within the greenery that surrounds her. Extreme closeups of garden plants and insects alike reveal details and textures, thin hairs, protrusions, ridges and stalks that transform this hidden micro world into a whole universe. She accompanies these images with a soundtrack consisting of processed bird and insect noises: reedy trills vibrating in clustered rhythmic pulsations. The slightly off-kilter bird calls resonate with the imagery, in which natural elements are made to seem strange and alien, as Menken peers into the center of a flower or pans her camera up a stem, examining the bumps and grooves in the plant’s flesh.

Spring by Nathaniel Dorsky
2013 / 16mm / color / silent / 1 screen / 23′ 00
Spring was photographed during the months following the winter solstice. I wanted to see if I could make a film that was in itself a garden, a film that, like the world of plants, would yearn and stretch in the oncoming light.

Presented on 16mm projection, alongside Super 8 films made in a series of collaborative workshops at the Mud Island Community Garden, building on its important social and environmental role within our neighbourhood.