Join us for a special screening of Scottish/Icelandic artist Elín Jakobsdóttir’s beautiful short film In the First Place (2021) on Saturday 12 November.

Following the screening, writer Sarah Thomas will read Liquid Ground, a response she has written to the film. Elín and Sarah will then be in conversation on Saturday 12 November at 4.30pm. Please join them and the CAMPLE LINE team for conversation and refreshments.

---

Primarily a painter, Jakobsdóttir works across a range of media, including drawing and sculpture. Film has an intermittent presence in her practice, and she has said: ‘Films happen periodically like a plant that flowers every couple of years under some special conditions or change in climate … film for me is the continuation of painting by others means.’

Jakobsdóttir first began experimenting with film whilst living in Paris in 2000 and having reached an impasse with her painting: ‘I borrowed a Super8 camera from a friend and experienced the freedom of not having to think about the myriad of possibilities within painting for depicting the world.’ Over twenty years, she has made a number of films that are diverse in their subject matter, but which often meditate on human perception, and feature unconsicous or dream-like sequences.

Jakobsdóttir’s most recent film, In the First Place, was shot with a Super8 camera in Glasgow and Iceland in the summer of 2020. The film begins in Glasgow: a boy paints a figure on a canvas with blue paint, rolls himself up in the cloth covering and speaks through a window pane with faces that appear there. The film then turns to the southern coast of Iceland, and to a site important to Jakobsdóttir’s childhood: her great-grandparent’s house in Eyrarbakki, close to the volcano Hekla, whose eruption in 1970 led to the family’s relocation to Scotland. Eva Scharrer has said that the film is ‘less a documentation of family or social history than a reflection on painting.’ Jakobsdóttir has herself said:

‘In the First Place refers to my origins in Iceland and also my first medium, which is painting. Having two territories both in terms of country and medium means having a double life. In Iceland, I have a large family with whom I have close ties despite leaving to live in Scotland when I was an infant. Iceland provided many formative experiences; I worked for a summer on a farm near Búðardalur when I was 15 and it was Reykjavik that I had my first solo exhibition….I would say this double life makes for a split identity since you miss the presence of people and the landscape but they persist within an inner landscape that you carry inside you.’

---