Simon Fildes and Katrina McPherson, Part 2

1 Mar 2006 in Highland, Visual Arts & Crafts

New Media, New Vision

KENNY MATHIESON continues his talk with Nairnshire-based new media artists SIMON FILDES and KATRINA McPHERSON.

N: SIMON, you came to video from a musical background – how did you come to work with Katrina?

SF: I was knocking around in bands for ten years or so, and never quite making the next step. Then I got to 30 and thought no, I don’t really want to do this anymore. It’s a young person’s game unless you do it on more casual basis, or are big enough to enjoy the international rock lifestyle! I was an average-to-competent musician, and made a little bit of money and a lot of friends along the way, but it wasn’t going anywhere. I got into video-making, and did my postgraduate studies at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee, but not at the same time as Katrina was there.

N: So you didn’t meet there?

SF: No. I felt I wanted to say something about the way I saw the world through the medium of video, and it was a great shift for me to do that. I started making video art, and got involved in editing, and that is how I met Katrina. She asked me to work on a film with her, and that was my first broadcast commission.

N: Were you into dance at that stage?

SF: No. I had never been interested in contemporary dance until that point – it was something of a conversion experience for me! The way Katrina wanted her work edited matched exactly with my approach, thouhg. She was interested in musical structure and ideas of repetition and counterpoint and so on. She would bring ideas to me and set up a mathematical structure for the edit that was very recognisable to me, and we were essentially re-choreographing the work at the editing stage.

Katrina has been a pioneer in video dance, and it is only maybe in the last five years that it has been recognised in Scotland as a valid area.

N: So your professional relationship came ahead of your personal one?

SF: It did, which is probably a good thing, I would say. We knew where we stood professionally. I rarely go on shoots, for example. I have a role in the initial stage when we are putting the concept together, but she then goes out and actually shoots the thing, either herself or with a director or a cameraperson, and I stay out of that process. Sometimes she will shoot it herself – she has an understanding of the dynamics of the dance that not all cameramen have, and she has very good eye. But sometimes you need to have someone else’s perspective at that stage.

N: Katrina, do you need that level of control when filming?

KMcP: Typically a director would work in collaboration with a choreographer, so I think my approach is quite radical, and it’s very important to find the right collaborators. It’s a more complex relationship. I have done a bit of choreography, but in video dance terms it is more a matter of working with improvisation. Choreography and my dance training has been a huge influence on the way my work on film has developed.

N: And Simon comes back in at the next stage?

KMcP: Simon is very big part of it. He has edited most of my work, and the editing is a huge part of the finished film.

SF: She brings that material from the shoot to me, and she backs off a bit at that stage. She logs the film and has her own ideas of what she wants from it. I never look at the rushes – I go to the stuff she has logged, we have a discussion about it, and then she will go away and leave me to edit it. We consult at key points in the process, but we don’t sit there at the screen actually working on it. I can be quite resistant to changing things I have come up with, but sometimes she will say, well, can we have a look at doing that in a different way, and she is probably right more than half the time!

N: And that process operates without undue stress on your personal relationship?

SF: It’s not always entirely smooth, but considering that we spend most of our time together, it has worked out very well. Basically I think it works as well as it does because we are both going in the same direction with the work, and fundamentally we both agree about what we are trying to do. Katrina appreciates that I have a particular view on the material, and we respect our roles.

N: Is that division of roles essential to the smooth working of the process?

SF: It has to work that way, I think. I would be too inclined to stick my nose in on a shoot, and I don’t want Katrina staring over my shoulder when I’m editing – it’s bad enough when I’m cooking! I’m not needed on the shoot. Ultimately it has to be Katrina saying this is how I see it, and she has been honing that process for 15 years, and I have been doing the same on the editing process.

N: The details of your various projects are on the websites that we cite at the end of this interview, but what are you working on just now?

KMcP: We are currently in the middle of a project called ‘Girl Band’ down in East Lothian, working with a group of young people and a very well known choreographer, Litza Bixler. I’m also working on a project at a hospital in Dunfermline. We are both involved with Research Fellowships in the School of Television & Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone. It’s been an interesting year – we had a lot on anyway, then Dundee came up, and we are trying to make it all work. It seems to be doing so – just.

N: You also had a chance to work with your brother, the photographer Colin McPherson, on a documentary last year?

KMcP: That’s right, on a documentary called ‘Catching the Tide’ for the ‘This Scotland’ series. That was a 24 minute film about Colin’s work documenting salmon fisheries round the coast, and it was broadcast last September. It was a great opportunity to work with my brother. He has been researching it for about 12 years, and there was no way I could have gotten to that level of research in a matter of weeks.

N: Simon, the genres of video art and video dance are relatively new and still quite undefined in terms of traditions and practice – is that an advantage or a disadvantage in having your work recognised?

SF: It has allowed us be a little spike in the cultural landscape! Katrina has been a pioneer in video dance, and it is only maybe in the last five years that it has been recognised in Scotland as a valid area. We are moving onto the web more and more these days – it is a significant medium for us, and increasingly so. Our concept of Hyperchoreography is now passing into common usage a great deal more, even in academic circles, and it is satisfying to see that happen, and to see other people take our concept and move it in other directions.

N: Can you explain that concept?

SF: For us it is to create a non-liner video dance form, and by that I mean you can navigate through a piece of video dance, and you can make choices as to what the next clip is that you see. What we realised through the editing process is that a video dance work, as in many film works, ends up the way it is on the basis of decisions that you have made at a particular moment in time, but actually there could be thousands of versions of the same project.

N: And you wanted to open those possibilities up?

SF: What we decided was why not give other people the material and see how they interpret it and take it forward, and give people an opportunity to explore a body of material in their own way. We have explored a number of different navigational devices to achieve that, and other people have also worked out different approaches to it. Some people argue that what we are doing is actually an asynchronous approach, but we still feel it is non-linear because of the user experience.

N: This is all web-based, and presumably very reliant on broadband technology?

SF: Yes, and it was a leap of faith at the start because broadband was not nearly as widespread when we launched it. One factor in it was frustration at the film distribution set-up, and on-line was a way to take control of that, but that is only really feasible with broadband.

N: Why have you chosen to base yourselves in the Highlands?

SF: I came to Newtonmore initially because I was spending a lot of time in the hills, and I figured that since I was coming here a lot of weekends anyway, why not locate here and work in Edinburgh? This was where I wanted to be, basically, and people thought I had gone a bit mad, to be honest. I could see the broadband thing coming, though, and I felt the possibilities were here.

N: So you were here before you got together with Katrina?

SF: I was in Newtonmore for two years before Katrina and I got together, and she decided she had enough of working in London and moved to the Highlands. We both gave up our jobs, and it has worked out pretty well – we have more work than we ever expected, although a lot of the work itself is not in the Highlands, which does mean one or other of us is away quite a bit.

N: Have you done much directly here, aside from ‘Catching the Tide’?

SF: I have had artist-in-residence schemes in Ardnamurchan and Alness, which were great, especially the Ardnamurchan one. I also did a really great project in Lossiemouth, and that had a huge knock-on effect there. We still keep in contact with them, and we did try to bring the Girl Band project there, but it didn’t fit with their priorities at that point, and we ended up taking it to East Lothian.

N: Do you feel that you are part of Highland culture?

SF: Not really, and I think it is because we haven’t quite been embraced yet, but we are hopeful that will still happen. I think there needs to be more space for contemporary arts practice within the Highlands. I could cite someone like Gavin Lockhart, for example, who I have a huge respect for. He has been crofting for 25 or 30 years, and has also been a great artist, and I think his potential contribution has been undervalued. I think that may be down to a misunderstanding between him and the arts establishment here – I believe that the work he does is completely rooted in his environment.

N: Can you integrate your particular art forms into an existing framework of Highland arts and culture?

SF: I think it is very difficult, to be honest. Rural culture and technology don’t necessarily equate in people’s minds, and I am on a bit of a mission to try to balance that. We need to rethink how we look at technology as an art form in a rural context. It does require a change of perception of the relationship between rural life and technology.

N: Technology presumably been seen as more of an urban thing?

SF: Technology is very associated with urban settings, and we are looking to apply it to a different context. Is Highland culture all about a traditional way of life or a craft way of life, or should we see it in a wider context of modern life?

N: And that means re-thinking established perceptions?

SF: There is resistance to giving up on that older view of a rural idyll, but we are seeing more technological development in the Highlands and Islands now. Tradition is fine, and there is clearly a real place for it, but alongside other ways of doing and seeing things. I think that is happening to some extent already – there is fantastic contemporary craft work going on, for example, and we need to address the fact that we have to go beyond dressing the culture up in tartan. Let’s do something we can be proud of.

N: You sound a bit like a man on a mission …

SF: That’s my soapbox issue, I’m afraid! Tourism is ultimately a low wage economy, and we really have to look beyond that. It’s great to have visitors and it is certainly great to look after our landscape, but if our children are going to want to stay here, we have to have more to offer them.

N: Simon and Katrina, many thanks.

The work of Simon and Katrina can be explored more fully at the following websites: