Lockdown action: Madelvic Wire Works and that dinner

During lockdown, I came across a photograph on the Living Memory Association Facebook page of a large group of Madelvic Wire Works employees - all male - taken at a formal dinner event in 1965. The photo had a cinematographic quality which reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

For this new video I reused photographs I took a few years of the derelict car factory, as well as video of a mixed media work entitled ‘The Works’ I created last year. I added the new soundscape ‘Husk’ created by musician/composer Harry Bongo with whom I have collaborated on numerous occasions.

The video evokes the eeriness this derelict building represents, grasping the forgotten sounds of workers’ conversations and the drafts blowing through the broken windows and doors, now all boarded up.  

The Madelvic Factory is on the ‘at risk register’ of Buildings in Scotland, and a ‘Listed’ building on the national register.