Boundary Layers (Companion Piece) is a film to complement the original Boundary Layers film which was part of the Scotland+Venice Collateral Scotland Exhibition at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. The original Boundary layers film-essay is a dual screen filmwork, projected onto a steel table, that takes as its starting point the landscape of Ravenscraig as it is now. It explores the traces of the former steelworks that remain and how new communities of plants, and how they grow, re-inscribe what was there before, revealing a legacy grain to the land. Using contemporary film and archive footage of the steelworks, Boundary Layers considers changes in place over time, drawing attention to the minutiae of mosses and lichens and the often overlooked but remarkable nature and value of the plants and wildlife that have reclaimed the site and made it their home. The film is accompanied by a spoken word essay, underlain with field recordings and interspersed with fragments of steel workers’ reminiscences, evoking time, memory, loss, growth and change. Overlayering different scales, temporalities and intimacies, the work quietly intersects with the climate emergency we are within. Boundary layers considers the lived and overlapping experiences of human and other-than-human lives that populate and have populated this place, holding questions about the passage of time, what might be remembered and forgotten, and what might be found.

Boundary Layers (Companion Piece) was made for A Fragile Correspondence's second iteration at the V&A Dundee, November 2024 - March 2025. This dual screen film is silent, capturing on one side the site as spring turns into summer, when the grasslands and flowers talked about in the original film are in bloom, and on the other screen, repeated and in slow motion, the moment when the steelwork's cooling and gas towers were demolished.