"The Hide" is a 9'16" film Shot on super 16mm digital format. First shown in the solo exhibition, "Below, the rocks fell into darkness" at the Studio Pavilion, Glasgow, May - July 2018, the film also toured to various venues in China in 2020 and 2021.

This film records the passing of time in a wildlife hide in a remote location on the West coast of Scotland. The hide allows the viewer to look upon the landscape through a long, panoramic viewing aperture. It looks out onto the land and water in a location where time is governed by the inexorable regularity of the tide. It’s mid-summer. The wind riffles through leaves, insects hover, and the camera examines the space viewed from the hide, but also of the hide itself. It’s a place that is almost a pause in the landscape, a place to view a pause in the landscape. Nothing happens. We just watch and wait.

For this showing/exhibition of the film, the site specific installation within a "shed-like" structure at PostROOM marked a departure from previous more conventional gallery/cinema type screenings. The shed structure at PostROOM echoed the construction of the eponymous wildlife hide in the film, with the shed having an elongated letterbox window, mirroring the viewing aperture of the wildlife hide, and an identical internal build made from Sterling Board, (a ubiquitous material in the construction industry), as seen in the documentation. A sense of a simultaneous experience within, and disruption of, our understanding of space - from the gallery venue in Central London to the film location in the Scottish Highlands - became part of the reading and context of the work through these echoes; the garden viewed through the long aperture window immediately to the left of the flat screen monitor also mirroring the filmed images. Viewer responses very much engaged with this sense of dislocation and simultaneity - of the sense of a live experience of two locations separated by a distance of over 500 miles - between urban and rural. The aspect of slowness, duration and dislocation, as a result, became heightened in this iteration of the film.

"The Hide" was shown at a 2 person exhibition at PostROOM, in London, 28 April - 28 May 2022. "Laurie Clark & Lesley Punton" was curated by Gallery Director Sandie Macrae at PostROOM - the latest incarnation of ROOM, which is a semi-peripatetic art space founded by Macrae in 2003. Clark exhibited a series of leaf drawings in the interior space of the gallery with Punton's film work "The Hide" being shown in an adjacent structure in the garden space.

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