EVA JACK - ELLA MACKAY

Eva Jack / Ella Mackay - Having worked alongside each other in a supportive capacity on many projects the residency at Arcadia marks our first formal collaboration: bringing together Ella’s experience as a theatre-maker with Eva’s visual art practice.

Our week was spent in an old stable building, with a large sliding door which plunged us into the darkness we needed, punctuated by wanders in the woods and through the stream for inspiration and to collect earth materials.

The residency had a clear focus on developing a micro-cinema performance which we be delivered in Spring 2025, as part of an ongoing body of work titled ‘Fragment Found’, funded by Creative Scotland. Fragment Found is an expansive project that centres around pottery sherds and their connection to people, place, heritage and the natural environment.

Micro-cinema is a lesser-known technique. It is a low-tech, physical theatre-meets-filmmaking technique that uses a tiny livestream camera hooked up to a projector to capture live perform ers as they manipulate and film a collection of objects. Micro-cinema is a powerful technique for visual storytelling and world-building. In our our project we are working with a combination of printed imagery, hand-made props and natural materials - all of which become subject to manipulation by way of the camera which can distort everyday things into the unexpected. Micro-cinema is a captivating experience for viewers as the making of the film unfurls alongside the film itself as the analog and digital worlds collide.

Although open-minded with what might come out of week’s work we came equipped with 4 pages of text written by Lara Chapman (a friend from when we both studied at Design Academy Eindhoven, in the Netherlands) which would be our script, guiding the narrative. The story follows the life of a piece of pottery - from being clay dug from the ground, through its manufacturing journey, onto the table as a plate and its eventual but inevitable breakage which results in its return to the earth. The project centres around the emergence of forgotten objects - sherds of pottery - buried in the earth. We explore imagined histories and the multiple lives of an object through time. As it continually re-emerges in new forms, touched by different hands, what has it seen and witnessed? We will use the unique micro-cinema technique to slowly tease out these stories through imagery, snippets of history continually rising but never fully surfacing.

We began the week with a car-full of stuff: two projectors, two tiny cameras that fit in the palm of your hand, a tangle of cables, and a collection of archival imagery, books, crockery, clay, cardboard, mirrors, lights and other possibly interesting things. After having hauled a long paint splattered into the stable we began our setup - attaching the little cameras to mic stands and hooking up our projectors. From their fixed positions - one Birds Eye view and the other side on - we began presenting a series of objects to the cameras to see what images they might re veal. The beauty of micro-cinema lies in its power to distort the everyday into something other worldly - a pebble can become a canyon and a corduroy shirt can become a crop field. Texture and detail - usually unseen by the human eye - emerges. Light and shadows bring movement and depth to otherwise static imagery, in the same way the sun dances round a room over the course of a day. The cameras are incredibly effective at working within millimetres of their sub jects and are focused manually, with subtle turns of the lens making big changes.

Our week in images:

1. Testing positions for cameras. Bird’s eye view and side on.

2. Archival imagery unintentionally placed on the ground. Like the layering.

3. Rainy evening separating the landscape into close, mid, faraway. Looks like a theatre set.

4. A blue willow plate printed onto acetate. Attempts at conveying the transfering process of the design onto pottery.

5. Clay from the stream at Arcadia worked into a ball.

6. View from the cabin window looking like a projector screen.

7. Recording sounds of the water. iPhone placed dangerously on slatted bridge.

8. Recreating the stream using collected earth materials contained within a plastic container.

9. A walk through the stream

10. Rock and root becomes a tiny tree.