How Moth the Night Is was created for Third Thursdays, an arts, music, and culture programme that aims to make the centre of Brighton the place to be, with events, performances, film projections, and new artwork commissions.
How Moth the Night Is explores our connection to nature and the landscape through the lens of memory and remembering. The film was created collaboratively by Brighton-based filmmaker Thomas Buckley and a range of local people from Gateway Women’s Centre and Preston Park Recovery Centre who took part in photography and creative writing workshops run by Creative Future.
Featuring spoken word poetry by Patrick Ward inspired by the work of Kamau Brathwaite, and strong visual metaphors around natural, and human cycles, the film has no beginning or end but seamlessly loops in its own natural rhythm. It uses both traditional analogue mediums of stop motion and hand-drawn frame animation, alongside new digital techniques such as photogrammetry and 3D modelling.
It was part of a programme of film screenings, projections and live music that took place in various locations in central Brighton.
View the final film below
The project was supported by the Contain Outbreak Management Fund.
Our workshop tutors who worked on the project were:
Tara Gould
Tara Gould is an award-winning writer, nature artist, and meditation teacher. Her recent work highlights through story and experiences how nature and the human are bound together, exploring landscape, change and loss, and how creation can emerge from the uncertainty and turbulence of life. Since the start of the pandemic she has worked with local organisations, facilitating nature walking and writing workshops that draw on literature, art and wildlife to help individuals deepen their relationship with the natural world and find solace and inspiration. She is a former writer in residence at Preston Park Recovery Centre, a previous Spotlight award winner, and is currently writing a book of nature stories set at Tide Mills.
Eva Louise Jonas
Eva is a visual artist and co-founder of UnderExposed. She uses photography to explore the processes by which people are situated within landscapes, focusing on its expression in traces, gestures, and places. In her work as an Artist Educator, she facilitates creative workshops for LGBTQ+ young people, engaging them in sensory and group-based exercises to explore notions of agency, self, and place.
Hannah O’Hara
Hannah is a lens-based artist located in Sussex. Working with traditional and alternative photographic techniques, her work often incorporates and repurposes archived photographs and natural materials. Her practice explores temporality and place, considering how place operates as a site of experience and memory.
