Luke Fowler

This film was made during NVA's Half-Life production which took place in Argyll in 2006.

Shot on 16mm and featuring a soundtrack by Toshiya Tsunoda, Luke Fowler's film pays tribute to the French master’s impressionistic approach to light and nature (notably his Mont Sainte-Victoire series) through his own resplendant glimpses of landscapes and people in Southern France.

‘ Paddington Collaboration ’ was shot on 16mm film one morning in and around a flat in Paddington , London. Inspired by a history of formal film experiments the artists imposed a structure with each controlling roughly half of the content. Fowler drew from classic ‘room films’ to document a journey from the interior of the upstairs flat to the front door of the building. McLauchlan then explored the surrounding area, following this exploration with shots of Fowler in front of the places he had previously captured. Fowler asked McLauchlan to draw over the first half of the film, instead she wrote about the events of that morning, a text that then forms the sound track. The narrative reveals the physical and temporal structures that guide this collaboration , together with those that shape expectations of what it means to contribute to this type of film.

Fowler’s film focuses on Sue Tompkins’ performance ‘Country Grammar’ created in 2003, one of her earliest pieces performed within a gallery context.

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Lee Patterson

A film about the life & time of ex The Homosexuals bass player Xentos Jones Luke Fowler's The Way Out: A Portrait of Xentos Jones, made in collaboration with Kosten Koper, is a tribute to underground punk musician and film-maker Xentos Jones and his band The Homosexuals. Fowler collages together diverse material related to Jones including interviews, music and even found fragments from Jones' own experimental films to create a haphazard and intriguing portrayal of this maverick character.

A series of portraits, made for Television, of four diverse individuals brought together through shared residence. These short films were filmed in the tenement where I lived for eight years. The first is shot in our bedroom, which doubled up as my former partner's office, the three others were shot in architecturally identitical spaces owned by my then neighbours. Shot and edited on a single 16mm bolex camera using available light throughout, the films invoke reflections on the four individuals, how they occupy these particular spaces together.

Luke Fowler’s work has long asked how we come to know someone in their absence. He has explored this question by creating posthumous portraits of individuals through precise compositions of the things they have left behind: recorded images and sounds, papers and notes, artwork, the spaces through which they moved, and the testimonies of friends who remain among the living. Patrick evokes the life of its eponymous music producer [Patrick Cowley] by all these means, taking in the postindustrial charms of San Francisco’s now-gentrified South of Market district, once famous for its dance clubs and leather bars, as if searching for Cowley’s still-lingering energy.

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Toshiya Tsunoda

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Taku Unami

A newly commissioned film by Alchemy artists in residence Luke Fowler and Corin Sworn responding to the legacies of textile designers Bernat and Margaret Klein and their Scottish Borders home.

George was an attempt to reconsider the basic components of my approach to filmmaking and boil them down to their bare essentials. The act of looking is implicit in my past documentary work but in this study it becomes the focus. The starting point for the film was the area that I was born and still reside in; the west end of Glasgow and its conjunction with the location where the film was first installed; a flat in Garnethill. The walk between these locations, and also central to the film is, through the St. George’s X area. The film deals with the relationship between sounds and images, acoustic phenomena and architectural details.

The quietly insistent and critical DEPOSITIONS attempts to restore some dignity to images of the communities of the Scottish highlands taken from patronizing BBC documentaries and news features from the 70’s and 80’s. DEPOSITIONS repurposes footage from the archives of the BBC and sound from the School of Scottish Studies, it is a film about differences and dichotomies: science and superstition, near and far, community and the individual.

As the winning artist of the 2008 Film London Jarman Award, Luke Fowler was commissioned to produce four short films for 3 Minute Wonder, Channel 4s shorts strand. The four films premiered on Channel 4 over four consecutive nights in April 2009. Entitled, Anna, Helen, David and Lester, they are a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence – a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow. Composer: Charles Curtis

A companion piece to Mum’s Cards, For Dan explores an intense period of correspondence between the artist’s late father and his closest friend, radical university lecturer Dan O’Neill. Filmed in an eco-community in Queensland, the film impressionistically documents both the friendship between these two young men and sketches a partial political history of Australia in the early 1960s.

Fowler’s portrait of New York School composer Christian Wolff continues his investigation into the legacies of 20th-century avant-garde music. Short, handheld shots taken at Wolff’s New Hampshire farm are assembled in diagonal relation to a soundtrack that features snippets of conversation with Wolff and passages from his compositions.

If the word Enceinte (meaning the “main defensive enclosure of a fortification”) is synonymous with “the body of the place”– what does it means to live within a body that is outside of time and without purpose? could these places be considered Hetrotopias? Or are they – as WG Sebald describes – alien structures denuded from human history? The first collaboration between filmmaker Luke Fowler and acclaimed sound recordist Chris Watson. Enceindre is a study in film and sound of two 16th century fortified cities: Berwick in the North-East of England and Pamplona in the Navarre region of the North of Spain. The film considers the wider psychological and social resonances of what it means to live within a town defined by its historical complex of defensive walls and bastions. By adopting an “infra-sensitive” approach to place; Enceindre draws on overlooked acoustic perspectives and lucid camerawork to propose a new framework in which to consider these anachronistic structures.

In part 2, Fowler initiates a new collaboration with Parisian-based composer Eric La Casa. Eric La Casa often consults maps, not in order to locate the habitat of specific species or significant sights but more prosaically to calculate proximity to traffic noise. The aeleatory nature of the routes taken often suggests a drift with the character of an “open investigation” and a broad appreciation for all sound. “The whole of my work consists in finding a centre, a listening point in relation to everything which is taking place. The microphones, then, amplify everything that this listening area transmits, that is to say, all the living substances in motion, from the interior of the body to the geophonic exterior”.

Filmed during a residency at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, former home of artist, filmmaker and gay rights activist Derek Jarman, Being Blue touches impressionistically on themes of sexuality, queer British life, art making, and nature.

What You See Is Where You're At is a disturbing collage of found and archived recordings constructs a profile of renegade psychotherapist R. D. Laings anti-psychiatry movement. In 1965, a community of 20 people-anti-psychiatry leaders, including Laing himself, and their former patients-move in together. Over the next five years, they collectively explore the definitions of madness. The film re-appraises the culture of oppressive psychiatry and multinational pharmaceutical companies.

How to create a meaningful dialogue between looking and listening? Luke Fowlers film cycle A Grammar for Listening (parts 1-3) attempts to address this question through the possibilities afforded by 16mm film and digital sound recording devices. In part 1, Fowler furthers his on-going dialogues with the sound artist Lee Patterson (Manchester, England).

In part 3, Fowler furthers his on-going dialogue with the sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda (Yokohama, Japan). Toshiya Tsunoda develops an on-going philosophical line of enquiry regarding the art of field recording, as a conceptual act, and that of the relationship between the “field”, the recordist and the audience. During these investigations, he came to think about the meaning of choosing an object to focus on; drawing the conclusion that “perhaps it is similar to a hunter who becomes more interested in shooting the bow than the prey itself”.

...in this new film, the performativity of his subject - Brunhild Meyer-Ferrari is self-evident. Composer Brunhild Ferrari, born 1937 in Frankfurt a.M., Germany moved to Paris in 1959 where she would meet and marry the composer Luc Ferrari. Brunhild Meyer, who produced a number of works of radio art in the 70’s and 80’s for SWF, slowly began to emerge as a composer in the last decade (adopting her husband's surname only after his death). Luc Ferrari, was a pioneer of ‘Musique concrete’ and a founding member of Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) with Pierre Schaeffer in Paris. Fowler’s film provides peripheral glimpses into their collaborative life and work but resists a traditional biographic narrative.