This Our Still Life

A new film by Andrew Kötting is always cause for celebration, and his latest is deliciously eccentric, yet touching portrait of his daughter Eden as a young woman in their tumbledown Pyrennean farmhouse. Last seen in Gallivant (1996) as a plucky kid touring the coastline of Britain with her Big Granny, Eden, now 23, is here shown painting still lifes and singing along to the radio as the seasons ebb and flow around her. Reminiscent of Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man, this lo-fi marvel features music by Scanner’s Robin Rimbaud and a range of voices from Kotting’s sound archive to explore notions of nostalgia, memory and place.

• Mapping Perception (1998, 37 min): The film result of a four-year collaboration between Giles Lane, curator and producer, Andrew Kötting and Mark Lythgoe, a neurophysiologist at the Institute of Child Health, London, with the participation of Eden Kötting.
• An History of Civilisation (2011, 7 min): The film takes as its staring point Southward Park in South East London. With a backdrop of Canary Wharf we observe a May Day Bank Holiday Fun Fair with all of humanity at play.
• Portrait of Eden (2011, 21 min): This portrait of Eden Kötting was filmed and edited by Gideon Koppel over a period of a week in October 2010.
• Fully illustrated booklet featuring essays by John Roseveare, Iain Sinclair and Sukhdev Sandhu and drawings by Andrew and Eden Kötting.