bearing fruit of fondness, Grounds of Coherence #2
05:40 / video installation / DCP / black and white / stereo / 16mm film hand processed with cotoneaster transferred to 4K / 2025
Filmed in Northern Isle of Skye, bearing fruit of fondness is a 16mm black and white film hand processed with a type of invasive cotoneaster that is native to Eastern Asia, and was brought to the UK in the 19th century as an ornamental plant. Working with elemental kinship, the process guides a capacity to relate to pain while grounded in the understanding of interdependence, where concept of belonging erodes through patterns of mother-child relationships that extend to nation and citizen, land and dweller. The film features a single-take vocal performance of the script in Chinese by Shen Xin, interspersed with breath and stillness against the Southwest storms heard from their home. The work is of a performative nature, and its script is available in both Chinese and English here.
One, when unrooted in the prescribed patterns of origin and pairings designated as the mother and the nation, replaces the dispossession of becoming with what’s unsought in the states of being, in order to make sense of the sounds of what is to cease in the wind.
Violence is a water-filled burn connected to the ways of hills, mountains, and landslides, whose speech is heard as much as it is concealed in images scratched and unprocessed.
The moving gate of permission in telling stories about luminosity is approached as the foundation one’s birthed with where shared air and named storms flow through relations abiding in love.
And the re-integration of imaging technique into a first language, provide what’s spoken, sensed, and felt with spaciousness that facilitates the reconstruction of belonging.
One holds awareness of what’s given an image a presence is at once the effect of one’s own migratory movements. And when place is home un-reified, to maintain love is to co-create, through embodied mother-child patterns, the language that readies sense and volition in a practiced connectedness that is also a form of clarity.
a story:
We moved to our home in Northern An t-eilean Sgitheanach (Isle of Skye) in the winter, as solar terms move through our place, they shone light on one berry plant as it grew quickly, widely, and visibly taking over spaces where heather and other plants breathed. The plant turns out to be a subspecies of cotoneaster in the UK that is considered to be invasive, or perhaps could be better described as inhabiting an unintegrated abundance. It was brought to the country in the 19th century as ornamental plants native to Eastern Asia and southwestern China (Sichuan, Tibet, Yunan, etc.), pointing towards the directions of one’s own roots. The name of the plant in Chinese ‘栒‘ alludes to the tree and its cyclic time: on the left – a pictorial symbol of wood/tree, on the right – a shared similarity in shapes of counting, between the looping of one’s fingers, and the ringing of sun initiated time embedded in a tree. ཚར་ལེབ།, sharing a descriptive form with rosary, the words for cotoneaster borrow impressions of its strings of berries. It is an ingredient in Tibetan medicine, its effect converses with the flow of air and blood. I used the leaves of cotoneaster, which is also phenolic, to process kindred images while living through their shared creation. Like woodwork learns the pattern of a being, filmmaking picks up the languages of the wind and the rain, the cycles of light and growth, the speed of intention and agency, and the rhythms of waves and gravity, enunciated together with the marks of flow and heat. This is how bearing fruit of fondness, the second work in the Grounds of Coherence series, has been heard speaking through its relations.
original script in Chinese: Shen Xin
english translation: Ali Van, Shen Xin
english script edit: Ali Van
camera and edit: Shen Xin
script performance, sound design and mix: Shen Xin
sound recording: Shen Xin, AX Archive
colour: Jason R. Moffat
this work is made on Northern An t-eilean Sgitheanach (Isle of Skye)
general audio notes:
The film consists of two main audio components. One is of Shen Xin performing a reading of the script in Chinese in one take, and the sounds of them resting and breathing in between. The reading inherits characteristics of gusts that are heard, for the other is of the sounds of South West storm experienced and recorded from the interior of their home by AX Archive, the collaborative duo of Shen Xin and Ali Van.