Film

a woman pulling a toy boat in the sea with a moody sky in the background
Like a ship righting itself, film still, Mounts Bay, 2020

‘I am passionately interested in surreal juxtapositions between the performed female body, domestic objects and landscape and in re-articulating and promoting alternative visions in which nature offers a feminist space of possibility because it is outside of domestic values and enclosures. ‘Playing’ in specific landscapes, women’s bodies are parodic and subversive, they confront, destabilise and transfigure stereotypical associations of women, and nature. Performance collaborations aim to transcend domestic ‘bounds’ and utilise the magic of encounter and the material symbolism of landscape’.

Delpha Hudson, 2023

Recent films echo themes from the performance and publishing project Theatre of the Self. They often explore the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, suggesting that we can re-write our stories and move differently across the ‘page’ of experience to improve our mental well-being.

Many performance films start with an idiom, a domestic object and are ‘acted upon’ in a local landscape to create a personal as political story about women, value and mental health. They suggest that we can all be ‘makers of self ‘ through narrative re-structuring.

woman in a blue dress ironing the sky
Ironing the sky, film still with Helen Sargeant, 3 mins, 2023

Ironing the sky (3 minutes) 2023, is latest film was made in collaboration with Helen Sargeant, at the Men-an-Tol stones, Cornwall

As with all fairy tales there is a darker truth, this dark moral tale is about a woman who is told to see the world as flat, and that she is flat and must remain forever so. She must perpetually ironing the world, her body and the sky. The story uses evident metaphors for devious patriarchal psychologies that control women, ’ flatten’ them and efface their bodies and selfhood. The story contrasts with the landscape in the film in which everything is ‘in the round’; the camera moves round in circles, the lush Cornish countryside and famous Men-an-Tol stones are round and the female body has depth, and shadow.

It’s also a personal story, maybe one that is very familiar to girls who grow up being told lies about who they are and what they must do to be happy. Girls are especially vulnerable to cultural judgements about their bodies and how to control them. They are often taught how they should see and encounter the world, not from their own experience of it. They absorb words that control their senses and block out the contradictions between what they see and understand and what they are told. They are ‘flattened’, unable to voice their own desires, their own dimensionality.

The metaphor of ironing is an ironic way of thinking about women’s stories, especially as ironing is a rarer domestic activity nowadays. As it so often falls to women to perform the impossible tasks of fulltime work, housework and family, women are so often flattened in a different way. The film aims to reveal devious ideologies in which women are confined, contained. and under-valued. Although there is no happy ending, the very fact of the film being made outside of the home in open spaces near the Men-an-tol stones in Penwith might give a sense of the possibilities of freedom and escape. 

More information about film works and the collaborative process:

The film follows themes in previous works that feature stories about women’s lives and are based around a domestic object, and simply performed actions in local Cornish landscapes. This is a little different as the collaboration with artist Helen Sargeant at her Men-an-Tol Residency in 2023, was unscored and unscripted. We spent one day together at the site, with some random items, including a lampshade, an iron, a big piece of cloth, some children’s ironing boards, and a picnic. We’d never worked together before, but felt something magical happen. Ironing the sky is just one of three films that uses material from improvised performances from that day.

performance at Men an tol stones
Ironing the sky, film still, 2023

Huge thanks to Helen Sargeant for playing and collaborating in the summer of 2023. Watch her ‘sister’ films from our collaboration online: Chrysalis & Iron my hair

woman pulling a small boat
Like a ship righting itself, film still, 2020

Like a Ship Righting Itself  (3.39 mins) made just after the first lockdown in June 2020

The phrase ‘Like a ship righting itself’ is used as a metaphor for mental health and in this short film written and made in Mount’s Bay, Cornwall Delpha explores a story about motherhood and loss. Using a basic narrative structure the spoken story follows simple imagery. Filmed on an iphone by Delpha’s husband Nigel Bispham who also composed and performed the haunting piano music ‘Pythagorian Theory’ that ends the film.

woman sweeping a rug in the middle of a barley field
Swept under the rug, film collaboration with Dr Marianne May, 2021

Swept Under the Carpet, (3.5 mins) is a collaborative art film made with Dr Marianne May in 2021.

Filmed in a barley field near St Buryan, May performs the impossible domestic task of sweeping a rug. whilst telling a personal story about effects of trauma caused by unshared secrets in families that affect women’s lives. The simple narrative structure of the film explores the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and how sharing can help us recover from past traumas.

Juxtaposing interior and landscapes, domestic tropes and nature, films aim to explore women’s lived experience and mental health. These simply made films based around performance and personal stories are linked to previous films made over the last 20 years that have been shown all around the UK and Europe.