Rosalind Fowler
Rosalind Fowler is an artist working with film, ritual and other embodied artistic processes as apparatus and methods for attunement and re-enchantment with each other and more-than-human worlds in times of ecological and societal uncertainty. She creates gatherings, workshops, rituals and interventions, using these as starting points for evolving film and installation work, often in collaborative and social settings. Her approaches aim to create space for re-rooting, imaginative encounters, and shifted forms of consciousness, between each other and other species, to cultivate new perspectives and new forms of kinship. Collective experiences, processes, materials and insights are performed, documented and re-visioned for film. The resultant work, combined with other imagery, weaves together experimental film, poetic ethnography, performance, and fiction. She sees analogue film as a form of magic with the ability to enchant and transform, her haptic approaches to filmmaking echoing a tactile, sensory engagement with the land through the work. She hand-processes the film using an ecological formula, subsequently tinting some images with natural plant dyes. The textured materiality of the work bears traces of these processes, often then layered with green-screen and digital imagery.
She has worked together with artists and across other practices/fields including sound therapy, herbalism, myth, shamanism, folklore, astrology, horticulture, and science fiction – drawing on these as both embodied and critical forms of enquiry to collectively re-imagine past, present, and possible futures. Participatory projects have included working with community gardeners at Organiclea food growing cooperative on the edge of Epping Forest, diverse residents on the Wenlock Barn Estate in Hackney, and with Syrian refugee families in Cornwall. All is leaf, so to amplify the wonder, recently screened as part of Serpentine’s ‘Shape of a Circle in the Dream of a Fish’ series (2022, with galeria municipal do Porto.)
Solo installations include All is leaf, so to amplify the wonder (2019) supported by ACE and Barbican as part of Walthamstow London Borough of Culture, BREADROCK, I carry you in my eyes, Kestle Barton (2018), and BREADROCK, I feel like doing this, PEER (2018) in collaboration with Fourthland, and NowhereSomewhere (2016) a 2-screen film installation for William Morris Gallery, Barbican Foyer Art commission, and Somerset House’s Utopia season. She was selected as artist in residence at the William Morris gallery in 2016. Others commissions include What Lies Below (2015) supported by Wellcome Trust and BFI, Tamesa (2015) NOW gallery, and Folk In Her Machine (2014) supported by AHRC. Her work has exhibited and screened widely, including at ICA, BFI, Jerwood gallery, Camden Arts Centre, and PLACE: Common Ground, curated by Gareth Evans (Whitechapel Gallery). Her short film Tamesa (2015) was nominated for Best Experimental Short Film Award at London Short Film Festival, 2016.
