Luke Fowler

About

Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material and unpublished notebooks, the film weaves a complex and personal portrait of Margaret’s life, from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to the potential Margaret envisaged for film as a poetic medium.

At the centre of the film is an imagining of an unrealised script for a feature film discovered amongst Margaret’s documents in Orkney titled Heartlandscape: Being in a place. Heartlandscape was originally written by Tait in 1986 but never got beyond the proposal stage. The proposal describes several sections and films – including Garden Pieces which was realised and became Tait’s final 16mm film. At the heart of Tait’s proposal is the description of a landscape, and a journey through it – covering a terrain of moorland and hillside that Margaret knew intimately as her daily drive; from her home in Aith – to her work at Orquil Studio, in Rendall. The journey encompasses views over Rousay and other Orkney isles and beyond it to the Atlantic ocean and Hoy but it was the diversity of the terrain that fascinated Margaret; covering everything from peaty wilderness areas, to pre-historic dwellings and signs of modernity – including TV towers and experimental wind-turbines.

Although Margaret’s films have been acknowledged recently as pioneering and ahead of their time – she lived a largely isolated life in Orkney. Her body of work – some thirty-two short films and one feature film were for the most part self-funded and self-distributed, and, compared to the work of her male counterparts, often dismissed or ignored for appearing too “amateur-ish”.

This film sets about to offer a new reading of Tait’s life and work based on her own notebooks, film scripts, recordings, correspondence and portraits of people that she filmed. The exhibition provides an opportunity to discover the works of Margaret Tait through archival material that demonstrates her multifaceted practice through her drawings, assemblages, poetry and films. Fowler’s film draws on the landscape and the terrain that was so significant in her work and creates a unique portrait of one of Scotland’s most significant, and proudly independent, filmmakers.