In response to the world wide lockdown, Glasgow based Scottish Ensemble, the UK’s leading string orchestra, announces the second in their series of Solo Collaborations. Each Solo Collaboration aims to capture the ensemble’s approach to imaginative cross-artform collaborations, bringing together creatives to remotely produce a new work together. This latest in the series, Pardes, is presented in association with Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery.
Pardes is the second iteration of Solo Collaborations and comes in the form of a film by Folkestone born artist Jyll Bradley that has been created in collaboration with composer Anna Clyne and violist Jane Atkins and commissioned by Scottish Ensemble.
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.
What I needed to do with the film was simple – to create a generative space for Anna and Jane. …Miraculously, although we had never met in real life and we were thousands of miles apart, as artists we had understood each other’s intentions. …This is the first time I have worked with a composer and musician and I am so grateful to Scottish Ensemble for the gift of collaborating with two such extraordinary women creatives.”
This new digital project explores the 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. 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.
Pardes, that will be realised as a major installation in the new warehouse space of The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh from November 2021 to April 2022, suitably draws its form from Scottish fruit-growing heritage, as the Fruitmarket Gallery takes its name from originally having been a fruit and vegetable market.
The Fruitmarket, that has been championing Scottish and international artists since it opened in 1974, 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.
Irene Brown
Radio Summerhall Arts 