Maracas Valley Studio Productions

Films

Synopsis

Beginning with an idea raised by Rex Dixon to fellow artists and the filmmakers, this documentary emerged as a collaborative way to engage in a creative conversation and to show work to a larger public in the time of Covid, 2020 to 2022. Disconnected from galleries and access to a viewership other than online and virtual formats, each artist contributed video footage and still images of their work shot in their own studios in three different countries: Rex Dixon from Trinidad in the Caribbean, Vivian Pedley from Sussex, England and Adrian Frost from Arkansas, USA. The artists, all born in England, talk about their development while also reflecting on the early influences of the St Ives painters and landscape in their work. The connections between the artists and St Ives are influential and profound. Adrian Frost was born and grew up in St Ives around the artist community which included his father Sir Terry Frost. He and Vivian Pedley have never met but collaborated online. They began their collaboration in 2015 on a project entitled the ‘The Furies’ on which Adrian had been working for some time previously. Rex Dixon worked in St Ives as a young man and associated as a visual arts officer with painters such as Patrick Heron in the late seventies. Vivian Pedley was born in St Ives and studied at Stourbridge College of Art where he met Rex who was a lecturer there. They have maintained a close relationship, often online.

The artists had all been documenting their work by Facebook and Instagram before and over the COVID 19 period, a communication that became more intense due to lockdown constraints. In the documentary Rex Dixon deals reflectively with literary references, nostalgia, and loss, especially of art colleagues in Jamaica. Vivian Pedley uses the minutiae of everyday life counteracting words with gestural figuration, drawing on literary and other personal experiences, and Adrian Frost uses both film and performance as well as painted sculptures along with verse, drawing on classical and literary references. Collectively this digital showcasing of text and image in their current work links back to early forms of human communication as depicted in signs and symbols of cave painting and illuminated manuscripts. Literary scholar and film theorist of Ireland, Dr Jean Antoine-Dunne interrogates the artists on their work and encourages them to talk more about their process.

The film reveals the states of alienation that cultural practitioners experience as a result of disconnection from their audiences, echoing the similar states that individuals were also undergoing in their homes, confined by closed borders during the pandemic of 2020. At the same time, however, the film goes beyond pandemic limitations to present another line of continuity in art and artistic conventions: how artists’ work collectively build on the references of the past and how, in doing so, these artists pay homage to the great writers and artists who have enriched and shaped theirs and our worlds.