Country Grammar

Anyone who has ever witnessed a performance by Sue Tompkins will be familiar with her dynamic delivery of fragmented texts, be it solo in gallery spaces or as vocalist with seminal turn of the century Glasgow-based quartet, Life Without Buildings. Luke Fowler’s films have adopted a similar cut and paste approach to transforming more straightforward documentary footage into something more poetic.

Sue Tompkins is filmed in the recording studio as she lays down a version of Country Grammar, one of her earliest performance pieces, which dates from 2003. Rather than adopt a make-believe vérité approach, Fowler disrupts the process in various ways, from having sound and vision exist independently from each other to making the camera appear to be jumping up and down. This echoes the playful physicality of Tompkins’ performance, which here uses two different microphones, so her torrent of words come at you from all sides.

(…) Image and audio work in counterpoint, as if thoughts were rubbing up against each other, flying blind into the next thing in tandem. Tompkins’ words and Fowler’s camera are unable to keep up, deliriously out of synch with their own thought processes that they’re chasing throughout the film’s eighteen minute rush. With four small paintings by Tompkins on the gallery wall possessed with similarly urgent splurges, the result is an ever-expanding mutual tapestry of words and worlds in motion.

The Modern Institute