Island Garden
Tessa Garland
Official Selection
𖤘 Short: Experimental
Shot on Super 8 film, Tessa Garland’s Island Garden captures an otherworldly landscape – a surreal garden adrift on a sandbank island formed from ocean detritus and sea plastic. The piece realises this Screening Room’s concern with excesses by making plastic and marine waste its focus. Garden assemblages and found structures become “mysterious relics, suspended between past and future,” testifying to the scale of our pollution.
At the same time, Island Garden performs a second, metaphorical flooding. As time “folds, accelerates, and dissolves into its own unravelling entropy,” Garland summons the emotional saturation that accompanies environmental overload. Despite its sensitive production – the artistry of its maker – the film (or, filmed artwork) conveys the weight of plastic pollution, reminding us that this accumulation of debris is not only measurable data but a material fact we now live beside.
This project could be just as easily placed within the festival’s final room, Return, for its championing of art as vital tool in this uneasy ecological moment, using the very stuff of such great concern to raise awareness.
Garland makes sculpture, film and installation, motivated by the investigation of the concept of place, and the capacity for specific sites to be charged with narratives and layered meanings.
Production: Tessa Garland
Courtesy of the artist