Walking the Island
Excerpt from Richard Ashrowan‘s “The Shock Of Each Moment: On the landscape films of Daniel & Clara” in Daniel & Clara Landscape Imaginary, 2022
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On The Island is a series of one hundred short films, initially started as a series of works for Instagram – short diaristic films of moments within Daniel & Clara’s daily walks on Mersea Island, and released in sequential order. They describe this project as a response to the psychological impact of the global pandemic and the physical restrictions of lockdown, representing their personal relationship to rootedness and place. The lens, even on an iPhone, remains a constant witness, a kind of third eye. Fixed in one place due to the necessities of the pandemic, Daniel & Clara’s daily routine involved walking the same walk, seeing the same things, day after day.
Filming moments of these, a distinctive visual vocabulary of compositions and sightings emerges. We see them standing, looking, listening, and perceiving. But what we see is not so much what they see, rather we are placed as witnesses to their presence in the landscape itself. Two figures, one artist, sensing the world around them. They are always together, this inseparable unit of two, sitting, standing, or collapsed on the ground. They mostly look at the same thing, only rarely do their gazes point to different places, and we never see them looking at one another, nor interacting with one another as two distinct people. They are usually, but not always, side by side. Always dressed in black or dark blues, always silent, always static, never in close-up. This is cinematic iconography with a compelling formal rigour, a sense of compositional design and controlled discipline.
The staged performances always possess an unnatural stillness – rarely, if ever, do real people look this way in or at a landscape. A meditative quality of stillness and presence emanates from the screen. Daniel & Clara inhabit these spaces as ephemeral sculptural presences, living apparitions, if also somewhat ascetic and monkish. The effect of watching them, one after another, is to notice the subtle shifts in form, small changes in the compositional relations of these two bodies in space. There is formality to the staging, and a wilful self-depersonalisation, an effacement of individual identities. These formal qualities in fact provoke the viewer into wondering about all that is not allowed into the frame. All that is not said, all of that which is restrained. What each of them may be feeling and thinking, as individuals. If such speculations may be activated within our imagination, this is not within the artist’s intent. There is, in the end, a forced silencing of our relentless internal monologue. All we have to go on is our reading of their sense impressions. Slowly, through repetition, it is through this sensorial filter that we begin to inhabit the screen space as they do, and the world of On The Island comes alive to us. Through Daniel & Clara’s felt presence, we feel a quiet compassion bloom, an awareness of nature’s essential healing.
To have experienced these films as they came out, one after another on Instagram would have been a very different experience to how they must be experienced now. For me, they were spread out together on a webpage, and I would select one, dip into it, then another, like reading from a deck of cards. The series has also been shown on a single screen, one after another in sequence, an experience I can imagine could be powerfully absorbing.
On The Island works as both a diary and a sketchbook, exploring formal compositional possibilities for what it means to be an artist with two bodies on screen. It is a searching look into ways they can inhabit both the landscape and the rectangular screen that will contain it.
Richard Ashrowan is a moving image artist and independent film curator. He was the founder and Creative Director of Alchemy Film & Arts in Scotland from 2010 to 2019 and was curator for Scotland + Venice at the Venice Art Biennale 2017.