Luke Fowler

Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material and unpublished notebooks, the film weaves a complex and personal portrait of Margaret’s life, from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to the potential Margaret envisaged for film as a poetic medium.

Turner Prize-winner Luke Fowler's film focuses on the life and work of the socialist historian EP Thompson and his involvement with the Workers Education Association. Presented in a documentary style format, combining archive and contemporary footage, the film questions our notions about how history is constructed.

Electro-Pythagorus is an intimate and subjective portrait of the late Martin Bartlett, the Canadian electronic music pioneer who studied with Pauline Oliveros, David Tudor, John Cage, and Pandit Pran Nath. His contribution as an interdisciplinary composer, educator, and founding member of Western Front, though undoubtedly extensive, is in danger of being erased from cultural memory since his death from AIDS in 1993. Navigating an array of archival materials including letters, correspondences, notebooks, personal photos, and a huge body of unreleased music and field recordings held at the archives of Simon Fraser University, Electro-Pythagoras is a journey through the evolution of Bartlett’s musical time and space, softly guided by Luke Fowler’s insightful camera and montage—creating an experimental portrait that defies one-dimensionality.

A series of portraits, made for Television, of four diverse individuals brought together through shared residence. These short films were filmed in the tenement where I lived for eight years. The first is shot in our bedroom, which doubled up as my former partner's office, the three others were shot in architecturally identitical spaces owned by my then neighbours. Shot and edited on a single 16mm bolex camera using available light throughout, the films invoke reflections on the four individuals, how they occupy these particular spaces together.

Collage film about R.D. Laing, who spearheaded the social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s, weaves archival material with his own filmic observations. For Laing normality meant adjusting ourselves to the mystification of an alienating world.

Fowler’s portrait of New York School composer Christian Wolff continues his investigation into the legacies of 20th-century avant-garde music. Short, handheld shots taken at Wolff’s New Hampshire farm are assembled in diagonal relation to a soundtrack that features snippets of conversation with Wolff and passages from his compositions.

In Spring 2013 I was artist in residence at Dartmouth College in New England. This was a vital time for me developing films and projects with artists Toshiya Tsunoda, Christian Wolff and Larry Polanski. I recently discovered a roll I shot during this time - whilst on a visit to the Cape with Robert. The occasion stuck in my memory because of a particularly infection I had caught which made me reticent to travel or do anything. I recall Robert encouraging me to come anyway and to use my Bolex as a way of counter-acting the virus and my general state of malaise.

Fowler’s film focuses on Sue Tompkins’ performance ‘Country Grammar’ created in 2003, one of her earliest pieces performed within a gallery context.

The second part of the N'importe Quoi series, the first being N'importe Quoi (for Brunhild), also comprises footage of Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari at her home in Montreuil, in the eastern suburbs of Paris, and at various other sites in the city, along with a set of sound recordings by Eric La Casa and music by Meyer-Ferrari. Fowler’s subject, German composer Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari, moved to Paris in the late 50’s and eventually married Luc Ferrari. Meyer-Ferrari produced a number of works of radio art in the 70’s and 80’s and has emerged as a significant composer over the past decade following her husband’s passing.

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As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Charles Curtis

A film about the life & time of ex The Homosexuals bass player Xentos Jones Luke Fowler's The Way Out: A Portrait of Xentos Jones, made in collaboration with Kosten Koper, is a tribute to underground punk musician and film-maker Xentos Jones and his band The Homosexuals. Fowler collages together diverse material related to Jones including interviews, music and even found fragments from Jones' own experimental films to create a haphazard and intriguing portrayal of this maverick character.

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Toshiya Tsunoda

If the word Enceinte (meaning the “main defensive enclosure of a fortification”) is synonymous with “the body of the place”– what does it means to live within a body that is outside of time and without purpose? could these places be considered Hetrotopias? Or are they – as WG Sebald describes – alien structures denuded from human history? The first collaboration between filmmaker Luke Fowler and acclaimed sound recordist Chris Watson. Enceindre is a study in film and sound of two 16th century fortified cities: Berwick in the North-East of England and Pamplona in the Navarre region of the North of Spain. The film considers the wider psychological and social resonances of what it means to live within a town defined by its historical complex of defensive walls and bastions. By adopting an “infra-sensitive” approach to place; Enceindre draws on overlooked acoustic perspectives and lucid camerawork to propose a new framework in which to consider these anachronistic structures.

Bogman Palmjaguar is a portrait of a man who became distrustful of people and withdrew into nature. Bogman is passionate about the threatened habitat of Scotland's Flow Country. But Bogman's early life and subsequent diagnosis as "paranoid schizophrenic" conditions his relationships with other people. Describing himself as "the hidden cat" and "wild outlaw of paradise", Bogman is taking legal action to remove the label "paranoid schizophrenic". His is both a search for justice and an attempt to find reason in the course his life has taken over the past three decades. Lee Patterson's evocative field recordings accompany the images.

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Lee Patterson

COP26FILM was shot in Fowler’s home city of Glasgow during the period that the 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) took place there in from October 31 – November 12, 2021. Denied entry to the main “blue zone“ the artist instead made daily walks around the periphery of the site recording the temporary infrastructure of the conference, security systems, police cordons and the omnipresence of Police helicopters. These combine to form a subjective image of state-power at a highly monitored and politically expedient event.

The quietly insistent and critical DEPOSITIONS attempts to restore some dignity to images of the communities of the Scottish highlands taken from patronizing BBC documentaries and news features from the 70’s and 80’s. DEPOSITIONS repurposes footage from the archives of the BBC and sound from the School of Scottish Studies, it is a film about differences and dichotomies: science and superstition, near and far, community and the individual.

‘ Paddington Collaboration ’ was shot on 16mm film one morning in and around a flat in Paddington , London. Inspired by a history of formal film experiments the artists imposed a structure with each controlling roughly half of the content. Fowler drew from classic ‘room films’ to document a journey from the interior of the upstairs flat to the front door of the building. McLauchlan then explored the surrounding area, following this exploration with shots of Fowler in front of the places he had previously captured. Fowler asked McLauchlan to draw over the first half of the film, instead she wrote about the events of that morning, a text that then forms the sound track. The narrative reveals the physical and temporal structures that guide this collaboration , together with those that shape expectations of what it means to contribute to this type of film.

Shot on 16mm and featuring a soundtrack by Toshiya Tsunoda, Luke Fowler's film pays tribute to the French master’s impressionistic approach to light and nature (notably his Mont Sainte-Victoire series) through his own resplendant glimpses of landscapes and people in Southern France.