Films from the peat
STACKS was commissioned during the COVID lockdown in early 2021. The brief was to design a creative project which explored the – often hidden – importance of peatland landscapes in the UK’s South West and the need for their restoration.
Around this time, I had been spending hours looking through other people’s windows, using a website called Window Swap. The website hosts films taken looking out at the view from windows across the world, as scenes of streets, gardens and forests slowly shift.
In a time when our physical movements were limited, I thought about how STACKS could offer similar ‘windows’ onto peatland worlds. I wondered, could we use film to draw attention to the rich tangles of life that shape peatland landscapes, and their varied tones, textures and patterns? Rose, Tommy and I are all fascinated by the creative potentials of working across different scales in landscapes. What happens when we bring different elements of the landscape – people, rocks, plants, water, animals – together in creative work exploring both micro and macro worlds?
When restrictions eased, we began filming. Tommy shot films through homemade lenses made from natural materials such as leaves on peatlands close to his home in Central Scotland. Rose travelled to Bodmin Moor, Dartmoor and Exmoor to shoot films exploring the potential of long, slow shots of abstracted peatland textures. And I began experimenting with shooting analogue film across the peatland moors close to my home in Bowland.
These initial films were informed by our growing understanding of the value of peatland landscapes. We wanted to think – visually – with ideas of peatlands as carbon stores, biodiversity habitat and floodwater sponges which help us deal with pressing environmental issues, both now and in the future.
“We also wanted to think about peatlands as archives of rich human and non-human pasts. Peat is an excellent store of material and memory, sometimes keeping human, animal and vegetation remains preserved for thousands of years.”
The STACKS artistic trio made film, audio and sound recordings across UK peatlands credit: Rose Ferraby
With Rose’s training and experience as an archaeologist, we wanted to remain mindful of the ways in which the past of these peatlands across the UK’s South West helps to shape their present and futures.
Initial shooting created a growing film archive of our own. We shared the films we were making and began to run them alongside each other to look for resonances in rhythm, form and colour. We decided that it would be an interesting idea to let the visitors to our website – at this point, the idea of a physical installation was off-limits – shape and curate the films they saw. So the trio format of films was conceived. Three strips, a nod to the layers of life archived in peatland landscapes, and the intricate stacks of peat turfs historically cut for burning.
“I had begun to shoot films in the dead of night in remote moorland streams. I projected archive images of peatland landscapes – turf cutters, stone circles, empty moors – from Bodmin Moor, Dartmoor and Exmoor through the water column and filmed the results. The river bed became the projection screen and the water the film’s grain, as washes of current, insects and sediment moving across the image cause it to flit and flicker in the moonlight.”
I wondered: if water flows could offer an environmental ‘developer’ for these films, what might the peat itself help create? Decomposition of plant material is slow in waterlogged peatlands. What might a decomposed peat film look like? I began taking 35mm films of peatland landscapes, and then buried the undeveloped film canisters deep into moortop peat bog and mires. After building small cairns to mark their location, I returned six months later to exhume and develop the films.
35mm film buried in peatland before animated in STACKS credit: Rob St John
Immersion in the bog had left organic traces on many of the films – whorls, bubbles, curving lines – and had disintegrated all, or part, of others, leaving patterns of absence and light flare. The landscapes in the original images had often all but disappeared, an erasure catalysed by their own decomposition processes. These films were then sliced into tiny segments – again, a nod to the scientific and industrial processes of marking and excavating the subsurface of these landscapes – and animated. The resulting films are bursts of colour and pattern from the bog.
Many of them seem to sparkle, like shards of quartz speckled in exposed peat. Visitors to the STACKS website can shuffle and curate their own visual landscapes from dozens of the films made by Rose, Tommy and I. It's our hope that the varied textures, colours and patterns we’ve unearthed help celebrate peatlands as much more than bleak, damp landscapes which are inhospitable to people. We hope that, when watched alongside the sound piece, the work helps spark new curiosity about these rich and remarkable places.
Thank you to Rob St John for his blog on the process of creating STACKS with Tommy Perman and Rose Ferraby. You can visit the website at this link here.
STACKS is a creative, interactive, project commissioned by the South West Peatland Patnership, a collective of organisations working across Exmoor, Devon and Cornwall to restore dried and degraded peatlands to benefit wildlife, people, water and the climate.