Root and Branch

Curated by Steven Ball and Karel Doing Root and Branch moves beyond the romantic illusion of 'unspoiled' nature to explore the deep material entanglements that shape our interactions with and inhabitation of seemingly natural landscapes. The selected films engage with nature through lyrical, sensory, and non-narrative modes, inviting a sensual experience of the natural world. In these works, the boundaries between document and material trace begin to dissolve. Together, they offer a multifaceted perspective on the intersection of the natural world, human consciousness, and the cinematic apparatus itself.

Followed by a Q&A with the artist moderated by Muriel Tinel-Temple

Programme:

Nettlecombe
Sarah Dobai, 2008, 8’26 min

This fixed-frame work depicts a landscaped garden whose stillness is broken only by the wind that plays across it. In the film projection that depicts a landscaped garden whose stillness is broken by the wind that plays across it. The piece, which is named after the estate where it was shot, creates and then undoes the illusion of the wind as a natural phenomenon. The piece reflects on the medium of film itself, the wind becoming an image of time playing across the photographic stillness of the garden.

Stone
Roz Cran, 2008, 4 min

An absurdist humour combines with a serious attempt to “get closer to things in the world” by physically embodying a feature of the landscape, by becoming a stone.

Eidolon
Mike Rollo, 2020, 3’35 min

The seer passes beneath branches, crosses fields, observes the quiet corners of creation. Bright and dark take turns showing their faces, a two-sided phantasm, one energy shape-shifting through time. The seer makes note, gleans eidolons.

Coyote
Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, 2023, 15’49 min

This is the howl, gaze, and agitation of the Coyote into the mountain. The Path of the Coyote.

Tuktuit: Caribou
Lindsay McIntyre, 2025, 15 min

Created with handmade and manufactured emulsions, Tuktuit explores the close and enduring connections between Inuit, caribou, lichen, and land use. Lichen developers help process the images of a caribou hide being fleshed down to rawhide to make gelatine for handmade emulsion that is subsequently used to shoot the film.

A Patriot of These Woods
Karel Doing, 2024, 9’35 min, 16mm

A Patriot of These Woods is a film that is inspired by the novel The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. Calvino's book tells the adventures of a boy who climbs up a tree to spend the rest of his life inhabiting an arboreal kingdom.

The Land at Night
Dianna Barrie & Richard Tuohy, 2024, 14 min, 16mm

I used to find the dusk a very unsettling time, as though the approaching night was something to be feared. It was as if, once night fell you could not flee, and had to face unspecified consequences. Maybe the land remembers and the night will reveal what we might have done...