Ellie Epp is a Peace River Country native: born in Sexsmith and raised on a farm outside La Glace. She studied psychology, philosophy and English at Queen's University, and film at the Slade School of University College London. Her films have become classics of Canadian experimental cinema. She has also worked in video, photography, experimental writing, garden design, digital graphics, and the web. The emergence of cognitive science in the late 1980s took her back to school, and she has a recent PhD in the philosophy of neuroscience. Her web book, Being about: perceiving, imagining, representing, thinking was written to work out a body-based philosophical platform for her own and others' work in art. She teaches embodiment studies at a small progressive college in the US and is experimenting with high definition digital video.
In the late 1970s Epp returned to her home territory with a Canada Council grant for a project about place. She lived in an old farmhouse near Valhalla Centre for parts of several years. The art she made during that time has taken images of the Peace River Country to many parts of the world. A two-hour show of slides and writing called Notes in Origin has been performed in Melbourne, Toronto, San Francisco, Montreal, and at Canada House in London. A film also called Notes in Origin was screened as part of the celebrations for the opening of the new National Gallery of Art in Ottawa. It has toured in Japan and France and is studied in film courses in art colleges across Canada.
Her talk in the Special Speaker Series will be illustrated with slides from Notes in Origin and will show how new findings in neuroscience support our native intuition that deep contact with natural landscape is vital to whole and lively minds.
Artist's statement:
I was born in Sexsmith and grew up on a farm fifteen miles west of there. When I was eighteen I was in a hurry to leave. I went away and studied and worked in a lot of different places. Now I'm sixty-three years old, have a reputation in experimental film and a PhD in neurophilosophy, and work in the US - but I'm still the Epp girl from La Glace.Where I come from has been important in everything I've done.
Coming back to speak to people from my own country is a wonderful occasion for me and I want to accomplish it in the most true way I can, so I have been thinking about what it is that I really want to say. Some years ago I was invited to speak at a symposium on land, relationship and community, and I gave a talk called Leaving the land: perception and fantasy. The talk was based on the experience of growing up in a small Mennonite family on a farm and it described how mystified I had been that people could live amid the fantastic beauty of the countryside and not seem to feel it, not care about it. I went on to talk about how recent neuroscience supports the idea of connection with land rather than religious or philosophical or scientific alienation.
I thought at first that I'd give that talk again at Grande Prairie Regional College, but I changed my mind, partly because that talk is already made; it's online if you want to see it. Mainly though it's because there's another story I'd rather tell you now. It is the story of what it was like to come back to the land as an artist for parts of three years in the late 1970s.
It's an illustrated story because I want to show you some of the slides I took during that time. I want to show the slides because I have always wanted to give these images back to the place that gave them to me; I used to dream of making prints and sending a set of them to every school in the county, so that kids seeing them in the corridor could feel confirmed in some secret love they feel for the bush and the fields. I also want to show them because I want to be able to talk specifically about some of the ways I was seeing, and some of what had gone into learning to see in those ways.
So this talk is about being with the land and not knowing it and then going away and learning how to focus and see and feel and then coming back and making images and then going away and working with those materials I'd made and found and now thinking about how all of that fits together.
"My films are documentaries, in the sense that they want to see and show some real thing. What they want to show is the qualities of natural motion, and then, beyond that, the experience of how much can be seen. A state of speechless seeing.
"Both my films and the landscape are full of things to see, but they must be met with a concentrated spatial attention. There is not a lot to be said about them.
"The film, notes in origin, stakes itself on the bare presence of a mind in a landscape. Images are given as separated takes so that it will be clear that their connections occur behind the scenes, in the landscape itself.
"A swan left behind on the ice turns her head. The moon rises into the frame at its own speed. A field stands evaporating at spring break-up. A sheet of ice amplifies the filmmaker's heartbeat. Heat rising from a cookstove throws tenuous shadow onto some cold flies. A cloud traveling toward the camera dazzles by the complexity of its reshaping motion. An invisible nettle is intercepted by porch rails. Small changes of light can be seen to be driven by the same wind that bends the nettle.
"What I like in film is precision, slightness, economy of means, delight, inference, and a kind of motion that can be followed but not tagged, and makes seeing intelligent."