Filmed in Dean Quarry on the Lizard Peninsula, The Mother’s Bones was made with the St Keverne brass band. The band originally formed in 1886 combining the workforce of two quarries and is now made up from generations of families who worked the site. The quarry closed in 2005 and still has an uncertain future. The music, composed for the film by band leader Gareth Churcher, creates a soundscape which is central to the film’s poetical description of the quarry, as a layered social and geological form.
Shots of the band playing with sound reverberating off the quarry walls are interlaid with microscope images of the stone and glass models of the seven crystal systems. Reynolds also draws inspiration from the Greek myth of Deucalion and Phyrra in which the earth must be repopulated by the few survivors of an epic flood, instructed by Zeus to throw ‘the mother’s bones’ - the stones of mother earth - behind them.
Abigail Reynolds lives in St Just, Cornwall, and has a studio at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives. She studied English Literature at St Catherine's College Oxford University. Her interest in books and libraries prompts her collages and sculpture work. Reynolds also makes performance works that bring groups together to consider layered and haptic readings of specific places as a physical experience. One of these, We Beat the Bounds was commissioned for the opening of the new Tate St Ives in October 2017.
In 2016 she was awarded the BMW Art Journey prize at Art Basel, to travel to lost libraries along the Silk Road. She has work in the Government Art Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New York Public Library and many private collections.
Film For Friday will take place in the Foyle Studio (level 3) apart from 29 November, where it will be in the Clore Sky Studio (level 4).