Boundary layers 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.

This work forms part of Scotland+Venice commission A Fragile Correspondence, one of the collateral events for the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.