NEW POETRY FILM 'PEER' (POEM VERSION)

'The rhymes are so clever and a delight'

'Favourites: “Can can clicks; 'Slapstick haptic'

'The drawings are lovely.'

“What you choose to see is up to you”. Powerful.'

PEER (POEM VERSION) is rooted in the Kent/Sussex coast and features footage of performance art from my personal archive as a performance maker, moving image works from my film practice, , and drawings on postcards of places/people/objects made along the coast since a child. The imagery is juxtaposed with a poem I have written which explains the significance of the seaside to me.It captures the strangeness of the British seaside using a telescope that operates like a blinking voyeuristic eye. It reuses performance documentation and footage from my archive as an artist including performances and drawings. The locations of the moving image footage and the drawings on the seashells and postcards were shot/drawn along the Kent coast including Herne Bay, Margate, Whitstable, Sheerness-on-Sea and Dover - all the seaside towns I loved going to as a child growing up in Kent in the 1980s.Black and white drawings reminiscent of the work of artists William Kentridge and Tacita Dean speak of a dark narrative through their nostalgia intercut with snapshots of human activity that pick up the vibes of the seaside. It may be easy to watch but there is so much to take from it. PEER follows on from LET RIP: THE BEAUTIFUL GAME as work that is very observant of English leisure rituals, in places offering snapshots of a less cosmopolitan England, Englishness and a nostalgia for an England that may or may not have existed. A Britain making do with the beaches that we have.

At surface level, the film is made up of just three simple elements: 1) mechanical viewfinder eye 2) the word ‘peer’) 3) footage behind. It may be easy to watch but there is so much to take from it. Putting together disparate images then allowing viewers to draw their own story, what is ‘seen through' a telescope combines nostalgia, British cheekiness, slapstick and a play on words (peer, pier etc.) The telescope eye used as a mask throughout the whole performance is constantly trying to focus.