Charlotte Prodger’s feature-length Stoneymollan Trail was commissioned for the 2014 Margaret Tait Award. It is the first in a trilogy of films including the Turner Prize award-winning BRIDGIT (2016) and concluding with SaF05 (2019), with which she represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale. This autobiographical cycle traces the accumulation of affinities, desires and losses that form a self as it moves forward in time.

Stoneymollan Trail marked a significant shift in Prodger’s practice – a move away from her previous multi-monitor installations toward the more cinematic logic of single-screen projection. Named after an ancient ‘coffin road’ linking the Firth of Clyde with Loch Lomond, Stoneymollan Trail traces a history of recent video formats as well as the artist’s personal history. The film begins with a sequence composed of Prodger’s archive of deteriorating miniDV tapes shot between 1999 and 2013. Moving image has been at the core of Prodger’s work for two decades. Its ever-evolving formats are inextricably bound to the autobiographical content of her work. She has mined the material properties of numerous moving image formats, not just because they inherently get replaced over time, but because she is fascinated by their formal parameters and sociopolitical histories; the sticky relationship between form and content.

Subject position is in flux throughout Stoneymollan Trail. As well as writing from a personal perspective, Prodger includes a passage from the memoir of science fiction writer Samuel Delaney and an extract from an essay by post-minimalist artist Nancy Holt, exploring the contingent limits between self and other via intimacy and labour. The roiling miscellany of footage on the screen is punctuated by eight shots of windows overlaid with the screen printed names of cross-streets in Glasgow, documenting views from spaces where the artist lived over several years. Stoneymollan Trail weaves images and experiences which constantly shift around in time and space, but it is locally grounded in its social attachments and means of production – tracing interrelations between technology, time, landscape, language and loss.

Biography

Charlotte Prodger (b.1974, United Kingdom) is a Glasgow-based artist working with moving image, writing, sculpture and printmaking. She was the winner of the 2018 Turner Prize and represented Scotland at the 2019 Venice Biennale. She received the 2017 Paul Hamlyn Award and 2014 Margaret Tait Award.

Solo exhibitions include BRIDGIT/Stoneymollan Trail, Bergen Kunsthall; Subtotal, SculptureCenter, New York (2017); BRIDGIT, Hollybush Gardens, London; Charlotte Prodger, Kunstverein Düsseldorf (2016); 8004-8019, Spike Island, Bristol; Stoneymollan Trail, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2015); Markets, Chelsea Space, London; Nephatiti, Glasgow International Director’s Programme (2014); Percussion Biface 1-13, Studio Voltaire, London; Colon Hyphen Asterix, Intermedia CCA, Glasgow (2012) and Handclap/Punchhole, Kendall Koppe, Glasgow (2011).

Group exhibitions include Palimpsest, Lismore Castle Arts (2019); Always Different, Always the Same: An Essay on Art and Systems, Bunder Kunstmuseum, Chur; ORGASMIC STREAMING ORGANIC GARDENING ELECTROCULTURE, Chelsea Space, London (2018); British Art Show 8 (2016); Weight of Data, Tate Britain, London; An Interior that Remains an Exterior, Künstlerhaus Graz (2015); Annals of The Twentieth Century, Wysing Arts, Cambridge (2014) Holes In The Wall, Kunsthalle Freiburg and Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York (2013) and Soundworks, ICA, London (2012).

Performances include Orange Helvetica Title Sequence, New York Book Art Fair, MOMA PS1 with Bookworks; Microsphaeric Howard Hughes Heaven Movie, Tramway, Glasgow and Assembly: A Survey of Recent Artists’ Film and Video in Britain, Tate Britain (2014).

Prodger’s writing has been published in Frieze, F.R. DAVID and Happy Hypocrite. Prodger has forthcoming solo shows at Kunstmuseum Winterthur; Mercer Union, Toronto and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She is represented by Koppe Astner, Glasgow and Hollybush Gardens, London.

Partners and Supporters

Distributed by LUX Moving Image. With special thanks to Emilia Beatriz at Collective Text.