08/04/2016

Charlotte Hodes - Questions of Travel selected by Crafts Council for their UK first film festival

'Questions of Travel' a film by artist Charlotte Hodes and poet Deryn Rees-Jones has been selected for
the UK’s first film festival launched by the Crafts Council and Crafts magazine, is set to be among the highlights of this year’s London Craft Week.

Real to Reel: The Craft Film Festival takes place on the evenings of 4 and 5 May at Picturehouse Central in London’s West End, with a carefully curated programme of different films shown each night.

Following an open call, 36 films have been selected from well over 300 submissions, covering the gamut of styles from animation to satire and from documentaries to surreal art pieces. As diverse as the films are, each looks at our relationship with materials and making in different ways.

'Questions of Travel' follows Elizabeth Bishop's poem 'Questions of Travel' (1956), deconstructing the binaries of ‘here’ & ‘there’ to develop the idea of travel as a metaphor for the creative process: reading, drawing, thinking and imagining. Bishop’s phrase ‘must we dream our dreams and have them too?’ is central to our exploration of anxieties about empirical thinking & the workings of the imagination. Hodes’ work, which uses physical handcraft & digital processes of ‘cut’ & ‘paste’ engages directly in a visualisation of Bishop’s own aesthetic. It enacts Bishop’s engagement with modernist techniques which sought to disrupt linear time into an act of what Bergson calls ‘continuous creation’. Rees-Jones’ underpinning research for the collaboration draws on Bishop’s early writing & her desire for what she calls ‘experience-time’; playing with screen, stage, frame, ‘binocular’ & ‘monocular’ visions we ally this notion with Bishop’s use of the term ‘stereoscopic’ to dramatise her particular poetics of looking.

‘ Questions of Travel’ was commissioned by Dr. Jonathan Ellis, University of Sheffield for the Festival of the Arts and Humanities, Sheffield 2015 and was first screened at the Site Gallery, Sheffield 15 May 2015. It is the second in a series of commissioned collaborations by artist Hodes and poet and critic Rees-Jones using the poemfilm both as artistic practice and vehicle for critical interpretation. Their project uses work by women writers, set at historical intervals, to open debates about female creativity. It forms part of an ongoing research project, ‘Reimaging the Muse’.