reorder

Martin Fowler

Programme Leader for BA (Hons) Fine Art

Website
Sheep-Walk is named after Marx’s term for the large sheep enclosures that defined the trauma of the C18/19 Enclosure Acts and their subsequent ‘Clearance’ (both Lowland and Highland) of the indigenous population.    With an emphasis on the plural, discontinuous and non-linear, these truth-to-materials montages, constructed from found image and stop frame animation, provide a fragmentary yet historically conscious perspective on the lived history of the Scottish working class. Demystifying conventional ‘ben and glen’ stereotypes of modern Scotia, Sheep-Walk reframes image, object and narrative in relation to the causal networks of capitalist ideology and the morbid symptoms of sectarianism, nativism, cultic militarism and commodity fetish.  Inspired by Brecht’s Epic Theatre, Godard’s materialist cinema and the anti-establishment writings of Tom Leonard, these oppositionalist films, breaking with the ‘art for art’s sake’ formalism of the Scottish avant-garde, ask us to think again about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. As the Glasgow poet Tom Leonard wrote ‘Any society is a society in conflict, and any anthology of a society’s poetry that does not reflect this, is a lie’.