Dark matter: being in-between on location

This paper critically reflects on the perceptual disturbances experienced during a practice research project which engaged with a rural site over a twelve-month period, focused on an unnamed hollow way in a remote area of mid-Devon. The resulting film, On Location, is a form of landscape cinema that observes a year’s seasonal cycle, capturing meteorological phenomena, the shifting light and shade, and the ebb and flow of natural growth using a range of experimental filming techniques, and accompanied by field recordings made at the site that capture the sonic architecture of the space. Whilst at the location, being ‘in place’ with my visual and audio recording ‘instruments’, I feel tethered, as if by means of an umbilical connection between ‘bodies’ – my own corporeal body and that of the Earth. I sense the uncanny feminine, the dark matter that we know is present in the universe, but which is invisible, manifesting itself in the agency of the unknown and unknowable spaces between, and the material specificities and repetitive rhythms of light and shadow that form the illusion of moving image. On Location embodies the pre-conscious interweaving of these perceptual disturbances. The film seems to collapse the divide between nature and culture, object and subject, human and non-human. It suggests a mode of understanding of the environment as a symbiotic conversation that is effected through a creative practice that emerges from a somatic substrate of reason, feeling and action to become a unifying and transformational experience between artist, audience, materials and place.