Outlines

Isabella Martin has combined stop motion animation, text and field recording to create Outlines, a film that tells an abstract story of the physical presence and processes involved in traditional dry stone walling.

Outlines is the outcome of Isabella’s Traditional Boundaries residency, which began in early 2020 and is now reaching conclusion. The soundtrack of the film came about through collaboration with Jo Kennedy, a local sound recordist, who offered a bridge for Isabella’s process to connect back to the Pendle Landscape, as Isabella was in lockdown outside of the UK. After coming for a couple of research visits, lockdowns made the residency far more remote than planned when Isabella unexpectedly ended up stuck in Copenhagen.

In Isabella’s own words: “A project that began as intrinsically local has been refracted through the lens of the global. I’m thinking about walls in fields and I’m looking at the walls of my home, again.”