Waiting for Bas
Super 8, 2024, 16 minsCommissioned by Sound/Image Cinema Lab, Falmouth University.
50 years ago, on 9th
July 1975, the artist Bas Jan Ader set sail in a tiny 12.5-foot
sailboat from Cape Cod, USA. His destination was Falmouth in Cornwall, 3,086 miles
away on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
The trip was a part of an artwork called In Search of the Miraculous, it was intended as the second piece in a series of three, but sadly it was never completed as Bas Jan Ader was lost at sea and never seen again.
Last year we made a film called Waiting for Bas, a personal tribute to Bas Jan Ader. Our film starts on the rocky shore of Pendennis Point in Falmouth where he would have first been seen coming over the horizon had his journey been successful. From there the film unfolds through a series of unresolved moments, half-formed thoughts and irrational longings born from our encounters with the Cornish landscape.
The trip was a part of an artwork called In Search of the Miraculous, it was intended as the second piece in a series of three, but sadly it was never completed as Bas Jan Ader was lost at sea and never seen again.
Last year we made a film called Waiting for Bas, a personal tribute to Bas Jan Ader. Our film starts on the rocky shore of Pendennis Point in Falmouth where he would have first been seen coming over the horizon had his journey been successful. From there the film unfolds through a series of unresolved moments, half-formed thoughts and irrational longings born from our encounters with the Cornish landscape.
Filmed on
Super 8 and edited in-camera, the film became a meditation on time,
loss, mortality and failure after the camera jammed leaving two
reels mostly blank. Having discovered this only on our last day in
Cornwall, we embraced this failure as a poetic gift which led us on a
process of acceptance. In many ways this film became a more fitting
tribute to Bas Jan Ader than we could have ever planned.
From these
initial imagined traces of Bas Jan Ader we wandered for a week across
Cornwall from Falmouth to St Ives, along the way catching glimpses of
the spirits of other artists whose presence and absence had left
their mark on this landscape. From Barbara Hepworth and Alfred Wallis
to Ithell Colquhoun and Virginia Woolf, to the neolithic people who
carved the standing stones.
Waiting For Bas is a film about the traces of the past woven into the present, it's about artists as place-makers and, like maybe all of our landscape work, about our search for our place in the world.
Waiting For Bas is a film about the traces of the past woven into the present, it's about artists as place-makers and, like maybe all of our landscape work, about our search for our place in the world.
Little Miracles (Lighthouses)
painted photographs, 6x4 inches, acrylic on c-type photographAlongside the film we created a series of painted photographs depicting phantom lighthouses over the view from Pendennis Point in Falmouth, the place where Bas Jan Ader would have first been sighted sailing over the horizon if his trip had been successful.
As we stood upon the shore hypnotised by the crashing waves our thoughts drifted from Bas Jan Ader to Virginia Woolf who spent her childhood summers in St Ives. The lighthouse that sits in the nearby bay later inspired her to write To The Lighthouse, which like our film is a meditation on the unstoppable passing of time and filled with moments of unresolved longings.
Like the lighthouse beacons on the coast guiding boats on their journey, Virginia Woolf, Bas Jan Ader and many other artists who have come before are guiding lights to us, showing us the way with both inspirations and warnings.
