ARTISTS:
Sarahjane Swan & Roger Simian (The Bird And The Monkey)
EVENT:
“Orphine” – video-art installation at The Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival
VENUE: Room 307, Crown Business Centre, 20-22 High St, Hawick, Roxburghshire, TD9 9EH
DATES: Thurs 3rd April (12-6pm) / Fri 4th (10-6pm) / Sat 5th (10-6pm) / Sun 6th (10-5pm)
FREE
ENTRY
Based in the Scottish Borders, Sarahjane Swan and Roger Simian have been collaborating as The Bird
And The Monkey since 2010
on left-field music, videos, writing and art.
Tracks
by The Bird And The Monkey have been aired on Radio 1/Radio Scotland
(Ally McCrae & Vic Galloway), BBC 6 Music (Tom Robinson),
AmazingRadio (Jim Gellatly) and on the soundtrack of BBC2 / Switch teen drama, The
Cut.
Promo video, Do You Wanna?, was picked by the BBC Music Video Festival 2011 to be screened at Edinburgh Big Screen for two weeks.
Promo video, Do You Wanna?, was picked by the BBC Music Video Festival 2011 to be screened at Edinburgh Big Screen for two weeks.
In
2012 The Bird And The Monkey's debut short film, In
The Dark I Sat –
a surreal science fictional romance - premiered at Portobello Film
Festival in London and had its Scottish premiere at Alchemy Film
and Moving Image Festival, in Hawick, in the Scottish Borders.
That same year Alchemy’s Creative Director, Richard Ashrowan, commissioned Swan & Simian to produce the moving image installation, Sung To The Crows - an absurdist crime-scene, inspired by the anonymous 14th century Borders Murder Ballad, Twa Corbies - in a spooky abandoned office, Room 307, on the third floor of the Crown Buildings on Hawick High Street.
Sung To The Crows featured: experimental music (melancholy modern classical strings fading into a dark industrial track) and an audio soundtrack made up of whispering voices, cawing crows and trickling streams of water); multiple video projections and loops (a VHS tape spool spilling to the floor from a dismembered male mannequin torso; the distraught bride wading through a river, her white dress adorned with red sequin blood-spatters and cold blue hand prints, a redheaded woman silently screaming her rage at us, crows conspiring and taking flight, the psychedelic dream-wanderings of the bride). These projections seemed to be watched by a brooding male figure in league with the crows, hundreds of black feathers scattered around the tail of his admiral coat, and the ghostly bride, whose wedding dress stood elegantly, its trail reaching back towards the crow-man, 10,000 sequins hand-sewn into the fabric.
Other artistic and sculptural elements included: homemade photocopied crow wallpaper, a flashing blue police light, sticks painted white like bones, and the words of a morbid villanelle stencilled in gory red across the walls:
‘Patient crows,
you plucked the dreams from my eyes,
as I lay down too early one cruel night.
Bereaved, I leave my horses to the flies.’
The Bird And The Monkey must have done a pretty good job of tidying up after
themselves, because they’ve been invited back for more!
The theme of this year's Festival is 'Dreamlands', and The Bird And The Monkey will be presenting Orphine, the tale of one woman's descent into the Underworld to save the one she most loves.
The theme of this year's Festival is 'Dreamlands', and The Bird And The Monkey will be presenting Orphine, the tale of one woman's descent into the Underworld to save the one she most loves.
BIOGRAPHIES: The Bird And The Monkey
Raised in Dunbar, Sarahjane Swan graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Sculpture from Gray’s School of Art. Degree work included a 10 foot wave of fish skins, customized gentlemen's suits, abstract forms created from snake slough, free notebooks bound in fish skins that stank so much their recipients had to store them in freezers, and a document of contrasting religious beliefs. One work, inspired by the Heaven’s Gate Cult – 39 death masks housed in a travel suitcase - appeared as part of the graduates' group show at the RSA. After Gray's Sarahjane moved to London to design camp sculptural artifacts for a flamboyant nightclub, then on to New Zealand for three years to babysit for her sister and grow pumpkins. On returning to Scotland Sarahjane picked up a guitar and began recording strange lo-fi acoustica songs on a mono cassette recorder and painting herself blue for serpentine-dance performance-art videos down by the loch.
Brought up in Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders, Roger Simian, played and co-wrote songs in various alt-rock bands, released LPs on one major and several indies, played festivals (from Glastonbury to SxSW) and recorded BBC radio sessions for John Peel and others. All the while he dabbled in experimental writing and creating his own cut ‘n’ paste zines and DIY music videos. Roger’s fiction and poetry have been published in Scottish literary magazines, Chapman and The Eildon Tree, and his arts reviews have appeared in the Scottish edition of The Big Issue. He recently graduated with a BA (Hons) Open and a Diploma in Literature and Creative Writing from the Open University.
The aim of The Bird And The Monkey is to draw on these backgrounds to produce collaborative experiments in video, music, writing and art.
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