Scottish Ensemble announce the second in their series of Solo Collaborations, Pardes, presented in association with The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.
A film by artist Jyll Bradley created in collaboration with composer Anna Clyne and violist Jane Atkins and commissioned by Scottish Ensemble, Pardes is the second iteration of Solo Collaborations, a series of online audiovisual work born out of lockdown that embraces the unique possibilities of digital. Each Solo Collaboration aims to capture the ensemble’s approach to imaginative cross-artform collaborations, bringing together creatives to produce a new work together, entirely remotely.
Working together throughout the creative process, while adhering to all COVID-19 restrictions, artist Jyll Bradley and composer Anna Clyne collaborated closely to bring together Jyll’s visual world with Anna’s musical ideas. The final score was then recorded at home by Scottish Ensemble violist Jane Atkins.
Pardes is a new digital project that explores our relationship with the ever-changing natural world and is a meditation on creative potential, light and growth. The film opens with the hand-making of a small-scale model of an artwork incorporating string, balsawood and twigs with light-reactive Plexiglas. A mysterious, leaning structure emerges, registering between shelter, plant trellis and stringed instrument.
Placed in the light and filmed over the course of a day through time-lapse photography, the model comes alive as an organic, generative framework. Casting ever-changing colour, pattern and allusive shapes it makes visible both the sun’s powerful agency and its own creative potential.
Weaving through and informing the visual realm of Pardes is a richly composed world of new music, ancient, mystical text and everyday human life.
Artist Jyll Bradley says of the work:
Pardes is a six minute meditation on making the invisible visible. The model structure revealed through the film – and which will grow in size for next year at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh – is based on a minimal wooden screen designed by a Scottish gardener to harness the power of the sun for their wall-grown fruit. This metaphor – of the practical, spiritual and emotional ‘graft’ involved in creating a framework through which something may be revealed, be it a fruit or an artwork – lies at the core of Pardes.
Solo Collaborations was born out of lockdown and in direct response to the world ‘shutting down’, each Solo Collaboration aims to capture the ensemble’s approach to imaginative cross-artform collaborations, bringing together creatives to produce a new work together, entirely remotely.
Pardes will be realised as a major installation in the new warehouse space of The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh from November 2021 to April 2022. The Fruitmarket is currently closed for redevelopment and expansion and, while the project has been delayed by the Coronavirus crisis, the new Fruitmarket is set to reopen in April. Pardes has been commissioned for the warehouse space which was originally a fruit and vegetable market in the bustling city centre, and draws its form from Scottish fruit-growing heritage, in this case a simple, practical screen of wood, string and branches invented by a Scottish gardener to bring both sunlight and protection to their wall-growing fruit. During its life at the Fruitmarket, the installation, Pardes, will also make a space for new creation and this film project heralds this and plants a seed for future collaboration.