Filmmaker wins award for short linking memory, trauma and the natural world

Martin Shipton

Multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker Zillah Bowes has won a prestigious award for her short film Here Now There Then, which explores the relationship between memory, trauma and the natural world.

Bowes, whose acclaimed moonlight photographic series Green Dark stemmed from her artist residency in the Elan Valley and was acquired by Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, has been awarded the Earth Photo Sidney Nolan Trust Residency Prize, a two-week residency at The Rodd, Sir Sidney Nolan’s former home and studio near Presteigne.

Nolan was a leading Australian modernist painter who died in 1992.

The citation for the award states: “Her practice is a contemplative enquiry into climate change and biodiversity, focusing on the relationship between individuals and the natural world.

“Here Now There Then is a two-channel film using analogue photographs animated by frame variation to explore traumatic memory and the transformative power of proximity to a river.

“Set in Eryri, Wales and Bristol, England, the work references Chris Marker’s seminal film La Jetée and was commissioned by the British Council in partnership with Film London, g39 and Videotage, and exhibited in Hong Kong at the British Council’s Spark Festival.”

Bowes, who lives in Cardiff, said: “I filmed it mainly in Eryri on the river in the Nantmor Valley, which is really evocative and has a rich history.

“It’s a personal film about a slip of a memory, or more accurately, about remembering it in the body and it leaving me. But it could be any memory and by anyone.

“Here the process is river closeness – being in close proximity to the river. The cycle of remembering and releasing can be about all trauma, nature’s trauma, and what’s being lost over and over.

“There’s something quite special about this particular river and this particular valley, so maybe this exact process wouldn’t be possible to recreate anywhere else. The film is therefore also honouring this one place.

“The process that I’m talking about came out of my Future Wales Fellowship research (an artist programme with the Arts Council of Wales and Natural Resources Wales), when I was looking at how we as individuals exchange with nature and how to interpret that in a way that is practical and active. How can I create work from what I understand as an exchange with nature? How can I demonstrate creatively what that exchange could be? In my research, I started to track my internal experiences using different methods to find forms of expression that were tangible.

“So when I was making this film by the river, I was already able to note down in words the internal change I was experiencing.”

Relationship with nature

Asked about the gestation of her relationship with nature, Bowes said: “I grew up in a rural environment in south Gloucestershire, but with Welsh family. I spent a lot of my early childhood – I call it tinkering – just being in nature. I think many people did that. We didn’t have social media, so we were less online. I think that experience of being in nature never really left me. But when I went to study film and lived in the city, I forgot that I had that connection. Then when I moved to Wales, or back to Wales in a family sense, you could say I followed my instinct and went to live again in a rural area – near the mountain Cadair Idris. And I found a really strong reconnection with this idea of being in nature as a kind of tinkering.

“It revolutionised my entire personal experience, but also my work. I became very interested in learning about what was being lost in nature in the context of the climate crisis. I think many artists who work with nature now end up quite reasonably looking at this theme, because there’s so much potential for loss. I’m very interested in how we hold this uncertainty and how we hold it in our bodies.

“I’m trying to make work that draws people in. So I’m always looking for avenues that I think have this richness.”

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