Flight Lines

Flight Lines was a mixed media art project by Ryan Powell charting humanities entangled relationship with the pigeon. The project set out to explore the more-than-human worlds that layer the city and documented stories of exclusion as well as care and attention across the divides of species.

The project resulted in the creation of a new moving image work 'Rock Dove' as well as a photo series. Flight Lines also involved arts workshops that engaged people with experience of homelessness in a series of creative workshops in poetry, photography and filmmaking in partnership with Crisis Skylight Brent. Participants built up a body of work that was then featured in an exhibition alongside pieces by sculptors, designers and photographers whose work shared the aim of unpicking the political dynamics currently shaping our urban landscapes.

Happy is the Eye

Single Screen installation for the Dean Heritage Centre (2021)

The full film can be viewed here: https://www.forestersforest.uk/projects/28/forest-oral-histories

Happy is the Eye uses the Dean Heritage Centre’s archive of oral history recordings to create a visual and aural depiction of a forest dreaming of the lives of its past inhabitants.

The film uses these recordings and photographs from the archive to build up an image of life in the Forest of Dean during the 20th century, with a focus on ways that people directly interacted with the natural landscape.

The images and sounds of the installation are in a constant state of flux in recognition that nothing is static, that both the human, the natural and the relationship between them, are forever changing.

Wandering at Strange Hours

Commissioned by Swarm Dynamics for the exhibition After the Pandemic - Visions of Radical Renewal.

The lockdown has unmoored time from any kind of schedule creating a perpetual present which, given the backdrop of the pandemic, has provided plenty of time to feel anxious. But it has also given space for different kinds of drifting, both intellectual and physical. Time to read and pursue whims with energy and enthusiasm and drop them without feeling guilty about “wasted” time and time to wander without aim. With human life on standstill my attention while out walking shifted to the more-than-human-world which, it was comforting to see continued unabated.
Even in the city the more than human is all around us and requires only a slight perceptual re-shift, a tilt of the head, to bring it into focus.

Red Hook

This video profiles Red Hook’s abandoned grain elevator. The enormous structure was built in 1922, just in time to become obsolete.
Ports in New Jersey and further south were able to store and ship grain much cheaper than New York and use of New York’s canal system was already in decline due to improvements in road and rail infrastructure which made transporting goods over land a cheaper option. It was in use (at a loss for the most part) until 1965.
In the 90’s locals used it like a park in summer, taking advantage of the stunning views from the roof of Brooklyn, the Hudson bay, Ellis Island and Manhattan.
Today it is fenced of completely, the area around it being used as parking and storage space for trucks and shipping containers – the same technology that made the grain elevator obsolete.

Artist Moving Image