VDB Asks... Emily Richardson

Emily Richardson is a filmmaker and researcher examining the trace of human presence on particular landscapes and environments on the cusp of change.

Richardson’s films document sites of power and corporate interest at particular moments in time uncovering layers of narrative embedded in these contested landscapes, whether East London prior to the Olympics, abandoned military architecture of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment of Orford Ness, the oil industry on the Scottish coastline, the contentious expansion of Sizewell nuclear power station, or the exploitation of the Far North.

Richardson’s work sits within a lineage of filmmakers addressing ideas about our relationship to and impact on natural and constructed landscapes and environments through a reflexive observational approach to making work using a cross-disciplinary methodology that includes walking, photography, filmmaking, sound recording, historical and archive research, interviews, books and podcasts. Richardson's films have been shown in galleries, museums and festivals internationally including Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London, Pompidou Centre, Paris, Barbican Cinema, London; Anthology Film Archives, New York and Venice, Edinburgh, BFI London, Rotterdam and New York Film Festivals.

1. Can you tell us something about your background? 

I have lived in the UK most of my life, much of it in London and now on the East coast in Suffolk, which features in a few of my more recent films. I spent a few formative years in the U.S. living in San Francisco and New York.

2. What inspired you to become an artist? To use film, video? 

As a child I wanted to be a painter, my love of art came from my mother’s passion for all things cultural whether music, film, art, theatre, dance, literature – I was introduced to all art forms at a young age and developed a real affinity with painting, which developed into image making with photography and eventually film.

3. Did you have formal art training/schooling?

I went to art school in London and during my degree I was accepted on an exchange program with Cooper Union in New York and spent a semester there which probably cemented my path to becoming a filmmaker. Robert Breer and Tony Oursler left a big impression on me and I decided to return to the States to do an MFA. I was offered a fellowship at San Francisco Art Institute, so returned to the U.S. to study filmmaking. Steve Anker, George Kuchar, Sharon White, Ernie Gehr, Larry Jordan were all teaching there at the time alongside visiting filmmakers like Guy Sherwin and Martin Arnold. During that time I also worked at Total Mobile Home microcinema with Rebecca Barten and David Sherman who practically adopted me and it was there I really felt I had the most amazing education in film. Filmmakers like Luther Price, Sidney Peterson, Vivian Dick and Malcolm LeGrice all passed through the tiny basement cinema on McCoppin St in San Francisco and would continue the conversation after the screenings in the back yard.

4. How do you balance life and art? Are you able to make a living through creating art?

I have always made work even if at times quite slowly. I always set aside some time each day to work, even if only a small amount of time. I make some of my living making work and the rest from a patchwork of jobs, teaching, commissions, curating and at the same time raising two children single-handedly. I wouldn’t say it’s balanced, but somehow it all keeps moving.

5. What influences or motivates you in the world?

I am motivated by the women in my family; my great-grandmother was one of the first female archaeologists in the field; my aunt, one of the few people in the world who can read cuneiform; my mother, a polymath and writer focused on the non-human world and an early adopter of ecological living. Her strong focus on the importance of the non-human world where an active response to environmental issues was encouraged has meant I have developed a keen sense and critical awareness of these issues.

I am motivated by the people around me and by reading and research on subjects that inform my filmmaking and writing. I love watching films and for the past couple of years I have curated a monthly artists’ film night which is a way of bringing together films that I enjoy for an audience. I’m also motivated by environmental issues, a love of the natural world which feeds into my work along with a fascination with architecture and how particular buildings inhabit landscapes to become places.

6. What artists or movements are you following right now?

I recently discovered the writings of Roni Horn, which I am really enjoying. I am a trustee of the Slow Film Festival in the UK and I curate a monthly artists’ film night so I am always curious to see new filmmakers' work and try and incorporate some of it into my programming.

7. What was the last exhibition you saw?

Yoko Ono in London. 

8. What has been the best screening experience of your work?

That’s a difficult one, it’s hard to choose. A couple stand out – one being a screening of Aspect on 16mm in the forest where it was shot, at night with the audience having to find their way to a clearing with torches, sitting on hay bales. The screen was hung between the trees, and we had to run all power from a generator, but it was magical. The sound of the forest at night added to the soundtrack of the film in a way that could not be replicated. 

The other was a programme of my films at the Cinema Ursulines, one of the oldest cinemas in Paris famous for its eventful premiere of Germaine Dulac’s The Seashell and the Clergyman which ended in a fight between Andre Breton and Loius Aragon. Screening my work on 16mm in that historic cinema was wonderful.

9. What are you working on right now?

I’m working on a film that brings together connections between my great-grandmother’s work as an archaeologist, my mother’s work as a writer, and my own as a filmmaker. It is about memory and environmental preservation told through a journey to the Arctic World Archive housed deep underground in a former coal mine on the Norwegian island of Svalbard in the Arctic Circle.

This is a personal film for me and a way of linking the female knowledge of my family and the threads of cultural interpretation and readings of landscape that we have been involved in through generations at the same time as asking questions about the environmental implications of our digital ‘memory.'

10. How do you start a piece?  How do you know when a piece is finished?

For me a film starts with a place, a building, a piece of architecture or a landscape that is in some way contested or speaks to current concerns. I start by walking, taking photographs, note taking, reading and research. This is often one of the most enjoyable parts of the process when the film only exists in my imagination, so can be vast and expansive, unlimited. Through the process of making a film I have to accept the scaling down, the failure of it to live up to my imagined finished work, but I know it is finished when it is communicating some of the essence of my original idea and vision for it, if only partial.

11. What are you currently reading? Watching?

I’m reading Greek Myths by Charlotte Higgins with illustrations by Chris Ofili – a retelling of the Greek myths from the perspective of the female characters in the original myths.

Weather Reports You, Roni Horn. I went to Iceland last year and am now obsessed. Anything by Kate Zambreno – I love her way of weaving her everyday into her writing.

And I’m watching films by artists Phil Coy and Rhea Storr for my monthly film night.

12. Room for final thoughts:

Anyone out there who would like to send me any films for the monthly screening, please do get in touch!