Richard Ashrowan

An adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915), and a personal exploration of memory, the moon, the shadows of things and some psychological aspects of the filmstrip itself – its ‘Luna’ nature and its appetite for light.

Speculum is a moving image sigil, an attempt at a rehabilitation of the present through the prism of the past. The work explores ancient theories of matter in which luminous emanation gives rise to physical form. Taking the form of seven stages or seven failed experiments, the film draws upon the works of early light philosophers Roger Bacon (1214-1292), Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486-1535) and John Dee (1527-1609).

Mutus Floris (mute or silent flowers) is composed of over 5000 individual photographs of wild flowers taken over three seasons, at Phenzhopehaugh in Scotland.

A silent exploration of light and gesture, finding the light, losing it, moments of exploration, hesitation and connection.

A ritual evocation set on Dartmoor, through stone and water, the senses unfolding, drawing inward, and creating. The inner life embodied and manifesting as divine play, the Lila of Hindu philosophy, the Lila who was my teacher, now reaching down through the ancestral line in father and daughter.

Filmed in Fingal’s Cave, a dramatic sea cave almost an hour’s journey by sea from the Island of Mull, over the course of seven separate visits. The towering sculpted columnar walls and roof were long held to be man-made, or created by giants, or held up as proof of a divine creator. One myth suggested that the cave was the abode of a nine-headed sea monster, another that the Devil himself were buried beneath the island. The last inhabitants of Staffa, around 1790, left the island after the pot on their stove shook so violently during a storm one night, that they believed “nothing but the devil could have shook it that way.” It can be a wild, moody and inhospitable place.

An index of the thoughts of a single day, at home in Scotland, in the cold and dark of February.

A conversation of sorts with an ancient archetype, the vegetative man. The Green Man has been a symbol, a grotesque, a counterpoint, a warning, a celebration, a form of elemental embodiment, since prehistory.

"The troubles created a generation of escapologists. My generation became experts in the art ofdisappearances and denials followed by ignominious returns. My memory is fatally fractured, it divides and subdivides and disintegrates, but never outgrows its causes." Sandra Johnston. Negotiating personal and historical narratives in relation to sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, "That Apart" extends an ongoing collaboration between performance artist Sandra Johnston and filmmaker Richard Ashrowan. Compiled from a five-day encounter inside a bare gallery at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, a seriesof singular actions and gestures evolve, transitional moves that Johnston describes as an ‘autopsy of performative gestures’ from her 27 years of practice. Performing directly for camera, a solitary, exacerbated relationship to the artist’s body emerges.

A question of daffodils, or representation as substitution, or substitution as representation: a film haunted by what remains unsaid and unseen

A series of five ‘movements’. Each movement lasts between one and three minutes on a continuous loop. Individual movements can be shown on single or multiple screen systems.

A critique on the presence of cultural tourism in the high Arctic, an experience diminished by the hunger of the camera for fixed images.

A lament for the utopia of celluloid dreams, dreams of light and color in an almost monochrome world. It is also a lament for political utopia’s in general