Artist Sapphire Goss returned to her hometown to create Eternity City - a unique and ambitious multi-channel film installation about Milton Keynes, projected onto the architecture of the city itself.
Developed during open workshops for residents delivered by the artist over the summer of 2018, Sapphire captured footage of the patterns, textures and shapes of the city, and created ‘living slides’ from plants gathered in the city’s edgelands. For Eternity City, she created giant versions of these slides using the windows of the iconic modernist building of the Old Bus Station. As the sun goes down the film is revealed: the footage projected directly on to live plants that decay throughout the duration of the installation. The film is built up of multi-layered loops perpetually shifting, evolving and growing. It is accompanied by an original soundtrack composed by local musician Rob Shields, using manipulated sounds of cars and nature recorded in the city.
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Sapphire is an artist researcher working primarily in film, She creates collaged compositions from elements of footage, archive and video snapshots, often remixed and performed live. She makes films using experimental techniques, playing with textures and surface and using unusual patterns with light, fragments of archive and found footage with more traditional filmed elements to create abstract animations that have a physically tangible, textural quality. This layered style creates work that has a physically tangible, textural quality and evokes dream narratives, creating concurrent motifs, shifting patterns and layers of consciousness. With a background studying film and visual anthropology her work investigates ideas of place, culture and memory. This might take the form of installations, documentaries, commissions, workshops or live events. She is interested in engaging with overlooked, ignored or forgotten spaces, often within a challenging community context. She grew up in Milton Keynes and currently lives in Folkestone.
sapphiregoss.com
Twitter: @SapphireGoss
Instagram: @sapphire_goss
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Eternity City was generously supported with funding from Arts Council England and the Journal of Cultural Economy. Sapphire and Tracing the Pathway would also like to thank Winter Night Shelter (The Old Bus Station), Liz McFall, The Open University, Milton Keynes College and The Parks Trust.