Now & Next 2020 Artists Announced

Following the success of the 2019 commissions, twenty new short form audio-visual and audio pieces have been commissioned by BBC Arts, Screen Scotland and LUX Scotland as part of Now & Next.

We are delighted to announce the artists selected to participate in Now & Next 2020: Wild Tracks Radio with Richy Carey, Victoria Evans, Sam Firth, Kathryn Gordon, Rose Hendry and Isla Badenoch, Malcolm Mackenzie, Mariem Omari and Heather Andrews, William Aikman, Aideen Doran, Zoe Irvine, Marissa Keating, Mark Lyken and Allana James, Helen McCrorie, Benjamin Owen, Ciaran Pasi, K Patrick and Adrien Howard, and Rae-Yen Song.

Responding to two open calls for applications, the selected artists will develop 17 new works for BBC platforms with the support of a professional development programme to help realise their ideas to broadcast standard. The remaining three commissions will be produced by young people working in partnership with Platform and artist Juliana Capes, with mentorship from artists Sarah Forrest and Ashanti Harris.

Now & Next is a talent development scheme that nurtures and showcases emerging creative voices, offering artists working in a wide range of disciplines from across Scotland the opportunity to create audio-only or audio-visual commissions for BBC platforms on air and online.

About the artists

Wild Tracks Radio are a group of young artists from Edinburgh; Jamal, Khiana, Tara and Rona, and a composer living on the Isle of Skye called Richy Carey. The group are interested in sounds and sci-fi, and work together to imagine new ways exploring their surroundings through field recording, story writing and soundtrack making.

The group are making a sci-fi docu-drama, ​‘The Listening Crystal’, about four adventurers from different worlds searching for a legendary sound that is rumoured to have the power to bring peace to their home worlds.

Victoria Evans is an artist and researcher living in Glasgow working across moving image, sound, sculpture and installation. Victoria is inspired by physics, philosophy and feminist critical theory and how developments in these fields might facilitate expanded and inclusive knowledge making practices.

Victoria has made a short film with no dialogue that invites us to find the infinite in the everyday. Using macro photography and sound recordings taken from ordinary household objects, the film renders the familiar strange and offers an alternative, cosmic perspective on the domestic setting.

Sam Firth is a filmmaker living in Morvern Highlands. She makes first-person documentaries that explore scientific and philosophical ideas and which are often poetic in their form. She is particularly interested in our relationship to the natural world and the prism of narrative through which we experience everything. She often uses nature as an allegory to express ideas of memory, the body and our inner experience.

Sam is making a short film about love and woodland ecology which uses the interconnected organism of trees, lichens, mosses and mycelium as a metaphor for our relationships with each other and what it means to be an individual within them. The film is narrated by Juliet Stevenson.

Kathryn Spence is a dance artist and choreographer living in Shetland. Kathryn has collaborated across art forms and is often inspired by organic stimuli. Since relocating home to Shetland, Kathryn has been exploring how to make work as a performance artist in a rural location.

Kathryn will be making an audio visual dance film exploring organic movements in our environments, taking inspiration from bird migration to sea patterns, relating these to the organic movement of the body and contrasting this with human impact upon the environment, alongside videographer and lead collaborator Bo Morgan. Bo works as a Film Maker and Photographer as well as being a Music Composer. He harnesses these mediums with the belief that visual aesthetic and sound need to work integrally together in order to transport an audiences’ senses to another time or place.

Rose Hendry is a filmmaker from Dunshalt, Fife. Rose plays with cinematic language, visual poetry and the viewer’s experience drawing audiences into worlds both familiar and alien. She is fascinated by the fundamental building blocks of film, creativity and the process of recording, drawing on roots in music, dance and sound production.

Isla Badenoch is a writer-director and artist. Isla is an intuitive storyteller whose work has an individual style grounded in her roots as a documentary filmmaker. Through her distinctive lens, Isla’s filmmaking reflects a curiosity to tell stories of kindred spirits; the quietly hidden characters whose voices may otherwise be overlooked.

Rose and Isla will be collaborating with Dr Maria Maclennan FRSA to create an artistic response to her research in the hypothetical field of Forensic Jewellery. Through a fictional case, Maria imagines the story of a missing woman through the ring she leaves behind – and the active potential for jewellery to act as a time capsule for stories, evidence and memory.

Malcolm Mackenzie is an artist living in Plockton, Lochalsh. Malcolm’s practice centres around ideas of social and community engagement. Location is central to his projects, where he sees himself as a facilitator and looks for creative opportunities that bring people together, encouraging collaboration in order to explore unique landscapes, open dialogues and to offer a chance for people to share the story of their local area, with each other or to a wider audience.

Malcolm will be making a short collaborative film collaging footage of landscape and community shot by himself and residents of Lochalsh and Wester Ross. This film explores a unique period in recent time when visitor numbers are low in the area, offering an opportunity to focus on the lives of the folk that live there.

Mariem Omari is a writer and activist living in Glasgow. Mariem focuses on the creation of socially engaged theatre and multimedia projects exploring issues such as migration and displacement, honour violence, discrimination, identity and mental health.

Heather Andrews is a sound designer living in Glasgow. Heather has a grounding in radio drama and sound for moving image, binaural and ambisonic sound to produce work that transports the audience into a situation, a brief moment in time, to witness and feel a character’s experiences.

Mariem and Heather will be working together to make a factual drama audio piece. The piece tells the story of Safa, a young Scottish-Asian woman whose parents think she is possessed by a Jinn and go to faith healers to try and ​‘cure’ her. The immersive audio piece is based on true stories of mental ill health and Jinn in the Muslim community in Scotland collected as part of a project with Amina – The Muslim Women’s Resource Centre.

William Aikman is a sound designer, composer and sound artist working in Glasgow. William is a graduate of Glasgow School of Art and Glasgow University, and has exhibited sound installations internationally. As a sound designer he regularly collaborates with other artists, including Rachel Mclean, Rhona Muehlebach and Lucy Dunscombe. William is concerned with capturing and altering sound environments, often with a playful musical sense of re-organising sound elements.

William will be making an audio documentary and ghost story inspired by the forgotten village in Glasgow City Centre which was destroyed to make way for Central Station in the late 1870s.

Aideen Doran is an artist whose work addresses structures of power, the production of knowledge and the status of labour in an increasingly digital world. Doran works primarily with video and sound, collaging image, sound and text to construct strange new narratives that revisit historical moments, analyse the contemporary world and look speculatively to the future.

Doran will be making an audio work which uses a series of unreliable narrators to weave together stories across three centuries of civil disobedience and violent protest from her hometown of Lurgan, in Northern Ireland. Drawing from a conflicting array of oral histories, archival reports and family myth, the work reflects on truth, testimony and the unreliability of history.

Zoe Irvine is an artist working in audio and visual media, making large scale participatory works and carefully crafted individual pieces for installation or broadcast. Zoe has been exploring the phone call as an interesting medium for participatory work, including creating a live event ​‘This Evening’s Performance Has Not Been Cancelled’ presented by Bergen National Opera for the Bergan International Festival and the Holland Festival during lockdown.

Zoe will be making an audio narrative, woven from recorded telephone conversations between audience members and opera professionals involved in nine European productions cancelled due to COVID-19. Listeners will hear the connection of complete strangers, experiencing isolation in different ways all over Europe.

Marissa Keating is a Glasgow based film maker who specialises in arts based short form moving image and video. Marissa’s creative focus is capturing people with a sense of immediacy, whilst lingering on memory and process.

Marissa will be making an intimate documentary ​‘Between the Dog and the Wolf’ that focuses on the twilight period between day and night, as a zoo closes down for the night. The short film will examine areas between domestic and wild, public and private, reflecting on recent changes within our species own domestic space.

Mark Lyken is an artist based in rural Dumfriesshire whose practice focuses on making films, video installations, and sound art. Mark works with communities in Scotland and overseas, using observational filmmaking and composed sound to make gradually unfolding works that focus on identity, people, and place.

Allana James is a visual artist located in Dundee, Scotland. Working mainly in painting and sculpture, her work focuses on colour, emotion, and space, utilising techniques gained through her background in graffiti.

Mark and Allana are working collaboratively on a fictionalised portrait that captures the rituals and obstacles that Shadow, a Scottish trans femme graffiti writer, experiences in the making of her Wildstyle pieces. The film explores Shadow’s perspective; as a non-binary person within Scottish society, and as an outlier within the largely masculine subculture of graffiti.

Helen McCrorie is an artist filmmaker working in video and sound. Helen has made several short documentary film-essays, in collaboration with community groups, for cinema and gallery screening. Exploring sites of work and play, these films celebrate creativity and care. Helen is interested in how we learn, and how we relate to the environment and each other, through social activities, and uses moving image to question social power structures from a feminist perspective.

Helen will be making a poetic film manifesto, from the point of view of children, to assert their rights of access and equal access to green space, and for play to be recognised as learning.

Benjamin Owen is an artist working with film, music, performance, and installation. A celebration of participation, improvisation, and collaboration are at the heart of Benjamin’s practice. His work often uses live soundtracking to reframe and unsettle the relationships between film, sound, ageing, and the body.

Benjamin will be making a short film that asks how do we relate to our voice as it begins to change? The film and soundtrack will bring together folk who rely on their voice for their profession or for their sense of identity, generating a drifting audio-tapestry of vocal expression. From cattle auctioneers to curators of ancient instruments, the film will explore how our voice connects us to community and the poetics and soundscape of ageing.

Ciaran Pasi is a mixed-race writer and visual artist from Glasgow. For the last five years, Ciaran has been developing and creating his own work alongside working freelance in Film and TV. Ciaran’s work explores masculinity and unheard communities in both urban and rural settings – from the Roma population in Govanhill, Glasgow, to young men in Kintyre. Focused on character driven stories rooted in a sense of place, Ciaran works to find a universality in the local and the shared humanity in the details.

Ciaran will be making a short film exploring the life of young men in Campbeltown – a world rarely seen on screen. Blurring the lines between factual and fiction, the film will centre on two friends over one day as they experience strains in their relationships with each other and the town they call home.

K Patrick and Adrien Howard are writers and artists who have been collaborating for two years, working across experimental narrative, prose, poetry and publication making. They write consciously from a place of friendship, hoping to elevate it as both mode and a place of artistic production. Their work forms narratives exploring place, time and memory in relation to transgender existence.

K and Adrien will be making a sound piece that seeks to shift expectations around transgender narratives within the public eye. The work will lead listeners to believe they are eavesdropping on a private conversation between close friends, at first thinking they are gaining insight into their childhoods, but in a quick tonal shift from conspiratorial to outlandish the childhood memories expand outwards into something more surreal and more extraordinary.

Rae-Yen Song explores self-mythologising as a survival tactic: using fantasy and fabulation to create a private cultural and visual language informed by ancestral stories, diasporic journeys, relationships and shared memories.

Rae-Yen will be making a surreal, speculative animation using vivid drawings and textured vocal soundscapes to follow the circular, transitional journey of various interdependent ​‘monsters.’ The work will consider identity, hybridity and future livability through the visioning of an alternative world.