Works&Projects

Synopsis:

Louisa Fairclough’s Meet, was filmed at the time of the hunt-ban and was an examination of the rituals peculiar to blood sports.

Meet investigates the traditions of British culture and heritage. The four-screen installation resonates strongly with issues surrounding the nation's interest in class, ritual and identity.Louisa's interest was to understand how is it that the rituals involved in country sports, seemingly so out of sync with contemporary society exist.

Filmed before the 2005 ban on fox hunting Louisa's use of an anachronistic medium, the clockwork Bolex cine camera - a little eccentric and less threatening than a video camera - enabled her to film activities that had been inaccessible to journalists at a time when country sports enthusiasts saw their pursuits as under attack.

Each of the four screens looks at a different community; the riders, the beaters, the guns and the hunt followers. The form of Meet echoes Louisa's limited understanding of the rituals of these country sports, and the difficulties she experienced in trying to access the community while retaining a distance and impartiality during a politically charged time. The four films stop, start, never flowing smoothly: only isolated glimpses are seen. Similarly, only fragments of sound torn from their context can be heard. The dual filming process - originally shot on 16mm then re-shot digitally from a Steenbeck editing screen - gives the work a beautiful, shimmering, ethereal quality, and it is hard to place the film at a particular moment in time.