Modern Edinburgh Film School: Mairi Lafferty

Modern Edinburgh Film School presents a double-screen installation and discussion on the video, performance and drawing practice of Edinburgh-based artist Mairi Lafferty and will reflect on her recent residency to make new black and white 16mm film Droste at no.w.here in London. This event, which includes the guest speakers Dr Glyn Davis from Edinburgh College of Art and visual artist Suzanne van der Lingen discussing her relationship to cinema and fiction, forms a part of the exhibition Ripples on the Pond and its sister-essay A Poetic Measurement, designed as a conversation between works on paper and moving image by women artists.

‘Her work is about lived experiences, the subconscious, catharsis and change alongside a study in cinema techniques, particularly from the films of Stanley Kubrick and Peter Greenaway, which immerses Lafferty’s work in the mind’s, and cinema’s, intangibility. Her work discusses the physics of dreams offering an aperture into the subconscious and the world’s inability to sustain dreaming’s haphazard materiality and dispersed timescales. Their properties are hypnotic, dangerous and unpredictable.’

Ripples on the Pond is an exhibition which has at its core works from the Glasgow Museums’ Collection. It takes as the starting point recent acquisitions from Glasgow Women’s Library's 21 Revolutions series, relating them to other works in the collection and sparking questions about gender, themes and media choice in relation to women’s practice and visibility. The exhibition is a conversation between the works in the collection on paper and moving image with invitations to Modern Edinburgh Film School and LUX Scotland to programme artists’ screenings, within and beyond the gallery space.

With thanks to Creative Scotland; residency supported by the staff and resources at no.w.here, London.