Richard Ashrowan

Produced in 2010 in collaboration with performance artists Alastair MacLennan and Sandra Johnston. It explores the transformative qualities of the landscape through alchemy, situated in a sense of the uncanny, the seen, the felt and the imagined. Filmed in the Scottish Borders, the work explores an alchemical and pre-scientific sense of transformative engagement with landscape and the elements.

"The troubles created a generation of escapologists. My generation became experts in the art ofdisappearances and denials followed by ignominious returns. My memory is fatally fractured, it divides and subdivides and disintegrates, but never outgrows its causes." Sandra Johnston. Negotiating personal and historical narratives in relation to sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, "That Apart" extends an ongoing collaboration between performance artist Sandra Johnston and filmmaker Richard Ashrowan. Compiled from a five-day encounter inside a bare gallery at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, a seriesof singular actions and gestures evolve, transitional moves that Johnston describes as an ‘autopsy of performative gestures’ from her 27 years of practice. Performing directly for camera, a solitary, exacerbated relationship to the artist’s body emerges.

An index of the thoughts of a single day, at home in Scotland, in the cold and dark of February.

A conversation of sorts with an ancient archetype, the vegetative man. The Green Man has been a symbol, a grotesque, a counterpoint, a warning, a celebration, a form of elemental embodiment, since prehistory.

Filmed in Fingal’s Cave, a dramatic sea cave almost an hour’s journey by sea from the Island of Mull, over the course of seven separate visits. The towering sculpted columnar walls and roof were long held to be man-made, or created by giants, or held up as proof of a divine creator. One myth suggested that the cave was the abode of a nine-headed sea monster, another that the Devil himself were buried beneath the island. The last inhabitants of Staffa, around 1790, left the island after the pot on their stove shook so violently during a storm one night, that they believed “nothing but the devil could have shook it that way.” It can be a wild, moody and inhospitable place.

Made in the summer of 2008, out of an exploration of the Anglo/Scots borderline, one of the oldest borders in the world, an enquiry into the meanings that might be revealed at its heart and within its landscape. This piece took on the nature of a visual, philosophical, historical and yet deeply personal meditation.

Speculum is a moving image sigil, an attempt at a rehabilitation of the present through the prism of the past. The work explores ancient theories of matter in which luminous emanation gives rise to physical form. Taking the form of seven stages or seven failed experiments, the film draws upon the works of early light philosophers Roger Bacon (1214-1292), Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) and John Dee (1527-1609).

An adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), and a personal exploration of memory, the moon, the shadows of things and some psychological aspects of the filmstrip itself – its ‘Luna’ nature and its appetite for light.

Taking a more structural approach to the filmed image, this work explores a preoccupation with reflections, with Deleuze and the 'crystal image'. Gaston Bachelard, in Water and Dreams, thought Narcissus might never fall in love with his reflection had he seen himself in a clear glass mirror – rather he needed the mirror like surface of a pool, animated with the movement of wind, with depths and currents, translucency, reflected sky, the perceptual distortions that stimulate imagination and reverie.

A series of five ‘movements’. Each movement lasts between one and three minutes on a continuous loop. Individual movements can be shown on single or multiple screen systems.

Robert Fludd was a distinguished English alchemical philosopher, light metaphysician and Kabbalist. In the 1620s he published a tract on wheat, the “Tractatus de Tritico”, in which he described a series of experiments in which he extracted the luminous quintessence, or celestial fire, from wheat. His words are spoken in both old Hebrew and English.

Filmed in Iceland, this work explores the idea of the fixed and the volatile as a diagrammatic space. Repetitive processes of ‘fixing’ the volatile and ‘liberating’ the volatile from the fixed are ideas not only central to historical alchemical discourse, but might also be considered central to the act of perception itself.

A blunt Scottish perspective on Brexit, and a lament for alternate possibilities in governance. Featuring the leading politicians behind the UK’s decision to leave the European Union – David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage and Theresa May, plus extracts from the angel conversations of the English magus John Dee, from 1582, alongside some thinking about nails as a means to invoke angelic intervention.

A question of daffodils, or representation as substitution, or substitution as representation: a film haunted by what remains unsaid and unseen

Mutus Floris (mute or silent flowers) is composed of over 5000 individual photographs of wild flowers taken over three seasons, at Phenzhopehaugh in Scotland.

A critique on the presence of cultural tourism in the high Arctic, an experience diminished by the hunger of the camera for fixed images.

A silent exploration of light and gesture, finding the light, losing it, moments of exploration, hesitation and connection.

An installation work, with voiceover from the Aurelia Occulta (Theatrum Chemicum, 1659), a text dealing with aspects of Mercury, or mercurius, one of the most important and intangible of all alchemical concepts. A consideration of the mercurial nature in us all, and a mysterious encounter with feathers. Within alchemy, the rising of the spirit vapour from heated mercury was often depicted using images of feathers. Quicksilver, cinnabar, the winged messenger, Hermes: this is a vaporous spirit, elusive and hard to grasp, the aerial principle of flight and disembodiment.

A study in the visceral: labour, the weight of the body, how we might traverse space, and perhaps life itself, together and apart, participating, denying, folding, collapsing, surrendering, spinning, falling... holding, carrying, burden and release, kindness and dissolution. A journey of sorts, in which the camera remains fully involved. It was also a dream. With performance actions by Ezra Allen and Lily Ashrowan, filmed in the Scottish Borders.

Fire as a metaphor, and a worn out linguistic failure, the dead metaphor. Aristotle said, in the Poetics, “Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, on the grounds of analogy” Metaphor here can only give way to the real. Felt experience, phenomenological reality seem to be all that is left when grappling a flame. And what is written, in letter and image, seem to go beyond what can ever be spoken and heard.