Art Station film returns for a very special programme of short films by artist filmmaker Emily Richardson whose work examines the trace of human presence on particular landscapes and sites on the cusp of change with a focus on the relationship between architecture and its natural surroundings.
Location: Social Bar, 15 High Street Saxmundham, IP17 1DF – Please note Social Bar will be open from 5pm for pre film drinks and nibbles.
Film Starts: 7pm – 9pm
Tickets: £10
Image: still from Notes on a Film, Emily Richardson
Book here!Richardson’s films document sites of power and corporate interest at particular moments in time uncovering layers of narrative embedded in these contested landscapes, whether East London prior to the Olympics, abandoned military architecture of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment of Orford Ness, the oil industry on the Scottish coastline, the contentious expansion of Sizewell nuclear power station, or the exploitation of the Far North.
Her films have been shown in galleries, museums and festivals internationally including Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London, Pompidou Centre, Paris, Barbican Cinema, London; Anthology Film Archives, New York and Venice, Edinburgh, BFI London, Rotterdam and New York Film Festivals.
For LAND she will be presenting a selection of films including an extract of a work in progress No Before of After; Notes on a Film filmed recently on a visit to the Arctic World Archive on Svalbard; Immaterial Terrain made along the coast around the Sizewell nuclear power station prior to its expansion, engaging with ideas about energy, transformation, erosion, loss, erasure, memory and forgetting; Petrolia presenting a record of industrial phenomena of the architecture of the Scottish oil industry; Cobra Mist made on Orford Ness recording the physical traces of the landscape’s often secretive past, constructing an impossible experience of the landscape that evokes its history to the camera and Aspect, in which colour, light and shadow shift across the surface of the forest as the duration of a calendar year is condensed into minutes.
Image: still from Immaterial Terrain, Emily Richardson
Aspect, 2004, 16mm 9 min
Colour, light and shadow shift across the surface of the forest as the duration of a calendar year is condensed into minutes.
Petrolia, 2005, 7 min 50 sec
Petrolia takes its name from the redundant oil drilling platform situated in the Cromarty Firth, Scotland. The film creates a record of the architecture of the oil industry along the Scottish coastline.
Cobra Mist, 2008, 6 min 45 sec
Cobra Mist explores the relationship between the coastal landscape of Orford Ness and its traces of military history, particularly the extraordinary ruined architecture of experimental radar and the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment.
Immaterial Terrain, 2023, 7 min
Immaterial Terrain is a film made along a seven-mile stretch of the Suffolk coast between Sizewell nuclear power station and the mythic drowned city of Dunwich documenting a singular and fragile landscape at an uncertain moment.
Extract from No Before of After; Notes on a Film, 2025 6 mins
No Before or After: Notes on a Film is a work in progress examining ideas around extraction, preservation, and memory through the lens of a journey to the Arctic World Archive’s World Memory Bank which, despite the thawing permafrost, professes to protect world memory for 500-1000 years deep under the ice in a former coal mine on Svalbard in the Arctic Circle.
Image: still from Immaterial Terrain, Emily Richardson