I C U V, 16mm transferred to digital, WIP, 2024-ongoing

‘I  C U V’ (working title), is a collaborative 16mm film which explores optics, mirrors, maps, migrations & magnetic fields across the Isle of Portland, Dorset.

The film is a response to a series of visits to the Portland Bird Observatory and field centre, based in a former lighthouse on the southern tip of the island. Built in 1706, and once used to guide ships between tidal surges and the Shambles sandbank, the lighthouse housed early prototypes for diotropic technologies (using lenses and refraction to create light beams). 

Since 1961 the old lighthouse has been repurposed as a bird observatory and field centre, where ornithologists, birders and researchers study and record bird, butterfly and moth migration. Despite its changed function and purpose, the lighthouse remains a site for attentive looking, recording, signalling and shelter. The film explores legacies of looking, lenses and light, whilst also considering the perception of the birds, moths and butterflies which migrate to the island, incorporating a more-than-human perspective through the process of filmmaking.

Working in collaboration with the ornithologists and birders based at the observatory,  the structure and pace of the film will be determined by fieldwork, sightings and daily ringings, attuning to the rhythms and perspectives of migratory birds, moths and butterflies recorded at the observatory. There is also a reference to Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt, who visited the island in 1969, and made a Mirror Displacement work on Chesil Beach.