Mark Harwood

Abandoned Goods is an essay film exploring the journey of one of Britain’s major collections of Asylum Art containing about 5,500 objects (paintings, drawings, ceramics, sculptures and works on stone, flint and bone) created between 1946 and 1981, by about 140 people compelled to live in the Netherne psychiatric hospital in South London. Blending archive, reconstruction, animation, 35mm rostrum, and observational photography, the film explores the transformation of these objects from clinical material to revered art objects examining the lives of the creators and the changing contexts in which the objects were produced and displayed.

Set in the wake of Britain’s first financial crisis, the South Sea Bubble of 1720, and based on the inferred prison encounters between the thief Jack Sheppard and the writer Daniel Defoe, this critical costume drama traces connections between fiction, speculation and aesthetics.

Palimpsest charts the changing lives of the interior of one house over a period of three centuries, a time-frame compressed into ten minutes - portrayed through a combination of time -lapse, real-time, and stop-frame photography. The camera is fixed as the 'space' inside the frame itself transforms, destructs and evolves over the years: historical eras are evoked through references to 17th, 18th and 19th century painting and early 20th century cinema and the human presence in the house is signalled through scenes of everyday labor and domestic duty.

Palimpsest charts the changing lives of the interior of one house over a period of three centuries, a time-frame compressed into ten minutes - portrayed through a combination of time -lapse, real-time, and stop-frame photography. The camera is fixed as the 'space' inside the frame itself transforms, destructs and evolves over the years: historical eras are evoked through references to 17th, 18th and 19th century painting and early 20th century cinema and the human presence in the house is signalled through scenes of everyday labor and domestic duty.