On Location

A hybrid form of environmental landscape cinema capturing the year of an ancient hollow way that forms the stream bed for several springs in a remote area of rural mid-Devon, Britain.

Made in collaboration with the cinematographer and sound recordist Stuart Moore, the film takes time to notice the human and non-human traces of change along the sunken lane, observing a year’s cycle of seasonal changes and meteorological phenomena in the sunken lane using experimental filming techniques, such as pinhole cinematography and lenses created with water from a spring that feeds into the track, along with field recordings made at the site that capture the sonic architecture of the space.

It is the initial phase of a project that responds to Annabel Nicolson’s artist’s book, Escaping Notice (1977), and the hollow way leads to the isolated farmhouse featured in her book.

“Kayla Parker’s On Location poses questions of radicalism both in terms of audio visual aesthetics and of filmmaking methodology in addition to more overtly political issues of environmental degradation, human and non-human relations and marginalised femininities” (Screenworks, 2017).

  • Kayla Parker
    Director
    Reach, Heaven is a Place, Flora, Teign Spirit, Sunset Strip
  • Kayla Parker
    Producer
    Zinn, Reach, Heaven is a Place, Flora, Teign Spirit, Sea Front, Sunset Strip
  • Stuart Moore
    Cinematography
    Zinn, 31 Days, Reach, Heaven is a Place, Flora, Cinematic City, Teign Spirit, Sea Front
  • Kayla Parker
    Cinematography
    Reach, Flora, Teign Spirit, Sunset Strip
  • Stuart Moore
    Sound design
    Reach, Heaven is a Place, Flora, Teign Spirit, Sea Front
  • Kayla Parker
    Sound design
    Reach, Flora, Teign Spirit, Sunset Strip
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Short
  • Genres:
    environment, landscape, place
  • Runtime:
    12 minutes 30 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 10, 2017
  • Production Budget:
    500 GBP
  • Country of Origin:
    United Kingdom
  • Country of Filming:
    United Kingdom
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16.9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Gallery in the Cinema exhibition
    Plymouth
    United Kingdom
    January 10, 2017
    World premiere
  • MIA: THREE exhibition
    Bristol
    United Kingdom
    March 24, 2017
  • Fringe Arts Bath Festival: Primordial exhibition
    Bath
    United Kingdom
    May 28, 2017
  • Balance/Unbalance: A Sense of Place
    Plymouth
    United Kingdom
    August 21, 2017
  • In the Open exhibition
    Sheffield
    United Kingdom
    September 6, 2017
  • Cornwall Film Festival
    Falmouth
    United Kingdom
    November 11, 2017
  • London Short Film Festival
    London
    United Kingdom
    January 14, 2018
  • Now&After International Video Arts Festival
    Moscow
    Russian Federation
    February 7, 2018
Distribution Information
  • Sundog Media
    Country: United Kingdom
    Rights: All Rights
Director Biography - Kayla Parker

Kayla Parker is an artist film-maker and producer-director whose research interests centre around subjectivity and place, embodiment and technological mediation, from feminist perspectives, with an interest in the interface between still and moving images, and new materialism. In her practice, she works with film-based and digital technologies to explore the interrelationship between the body and forgotten, liminal spaces.

The recipient of many awards, her experimental moving image artworks have been presented around the world, in touring programmes such as the ICA Biennials, and exhibitions and festivals, with television broadcasts on Channel 4, ITV and the BBC in the UK and in Australia, Canada, France, Austria, and Germany. In the 1990s she is notable for creating innovative animated films, such as the animate! commissioned Cage of Flame (1992) and Sunset Strip (1996), along with As Yet Unseen (1994) for BFI Production, and Project, commissioned for the opening of the Lux Centre in 1997.

Her work since 2000 includes the digital films Inner City (2001) for Year of the Artist, and Small World (2007), commissioned for the Definitive Stories section of the National Review of Live Art, along with Teign Spirit (2009), an Animate Projects commission for Sea Change, and environmental direct animations such as Flora (2011) and Reach (2014, for the River Tamar Project). She was awarded the 2016 Plymouth-Nicosia Artist’s Residency at Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC), Republic of Cyprus, for Father-land, a collaborative film project with Stuart Moore.

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