ANNIS JOSLIN

STATIC is a 360 film, made by Sarah Cole & Annis Joslin over 2020/21. The viewer is placed into an uncanny domestic home, a looming suburban emptiness and intense dream-state environments where the actions of the characters resonate with frustration, desire, routine and an uncertain sense of agency. STATIC plays with scale, emotional instability, your sense of responsibility and our everyday failures in communication. It is darkly funny and a bit disturbing, but ultimately offers up some hope from the limited fractious scraps of what seems possible in this characters world.

This is a trailer for a 30 minute film comissioned by People United and made in 2018/19 in collaboration with Sarah Cole with women who attend Joining Hearts, Joining Hands, a support group for survivors of domestic violence and/or sexual abuse. Journeying through six passages of time, Messy Business was made with women who have experienced domestic violence and/or sexual abuse. Playful, insistent, dark yet uplifting, Messy Business is an elegy to their wisdom, resilience and pain, giving a voice to those who kept quiet but now want to shout off the rooftops. Made with Sarah Cole, as social arts practitioners, our aim in making this work was to find a form through which to communicate some of the experiences, regrets and aspirations of these women. The creative process involved exploring images, objects, words and mechanisms through which to talk about lived experience. Consisting of six interconnected segments, the shorter videos can also be used individually, as provocations, activist tools to help people speak about violence in their own lives.

A portrait of the artist John Kirby’s as he prepares to return to Liverpool, the city he left age 16, for his retrospective exhibition “The Living and The Dead” at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool January - April 2012 commissioned by Flowers Gallery, London

A film made by children and young people who have stayed at Chalkhill to help others who may be experiencing similar problems, to let them know they are not alone, and to offer hope that recovery is available.

Extracts of two filmic portraits made with and about two young people with complex needs commissioned by Project Artworks for their "In Transit" programme.

Cut to a broken collage of numerous versions of Burt Bacharach’s eponymous song as most famously sung by Dusty Springfield, The Look of Love slowly unravels the illusion of romantic love as sold to us through the pages of glossy magazines. The lover’s gaze is contrived through a sequence of cuts between different male and female air-brushed beauties of the white western ideal fantasy pulled out of magazines and held up like puppets by the artist’s hands. As we watch we may smile knowingly but the dream gradually shatters and the images become fractured and distorted revealing the reality of ageing and perhaps the false promise of love’s myth that we are complicit in consuming. At the end, we are reminded that this was in itself a performance as the artist's hand is seen drawing the final corrupted face from the frame.

Commissioned by Make Your Mark, Sussex Partnership's arts and health program this film promotes A Year of Drawing, a new year-long drawing project organised by Make Your Mark, will increase access to the arts for people facing mental health challenges and their carers through participatory drawing events across Sussex and Hampshire. I am also a lead artist on this project supported by a Peer Arts Worker (artist with lived experience of mental health challenges).

An extract of a film commissioned by The Royal College of Physicians. One too many takes one woman’s moving testimony to open out a discussion about alcohol including many voices and points of view. The film highlights the insidiousness of drinking culture and prompts us to consider our own relationship with alcohol. It was first shown as part of exhibition curated by Caroline Fisher “This Bewitching Poison: Alcohol and the Royal College of Physicians since its foundation” in 2014

As night falls National Trust staff and long term volunteers share private moments and reflections of their time at Mottisfont.