Nine Years – Sarah Wishart and Nicholas Middleton

A shot of the Greenway in Hackney – in the foreground is a sapling with white blossom and thorns on its branches. In the background out of focus is an area of grass and a number of people in winter coats are walking along a paved path. It is a bright sunny day.
The Greenway - Sarah Wishart and Nicholas Middleton © 2021
A shot of the Greenway in Hackney – in the foreground is a sapling with white blossom and thorns on its branches. In the background out of focus is an area of grass and a number of people in winter coats are walking along a paved path. It is a bright sunny day.
The Greenway – Sarah Wishart and Nicholas Middleton © 2021

This film walks us from the southeast to the east of London over the course of seven years. We started from what was the Heygate Estate around 2012 in the Elephant and Castle and through to Beckton Alps, the spoil heap in East London near London City Airport. Our walks include footage of the mile long walk under the Thames filmed walking through the Rotherhithe Tunnel with a steady-cam. The film has a layered soundscape of the accounts of arrivals, art life and relationship with London from four European artists (Franko B, Noemi Lakmaier, Xavier de Sousa and Vlatka Horvat) who relocated to London at different stages in their lives and practice. 

This film has been slowed by the pandemic and my relocation to Glasgow. We are still working on the audio layering and as soon as this has been completed – this trailer will be swapped for the final film.

Nicholas Middleton is currently a research student at the Royal College of Art. As a painter he’s exhibited widely in the UK, as well as abroad, and has been selected for the prestigious John Moores Painting Prize five times, twice winning the Visitors’ Choice Prize. Recent work has investigated the relationship between photography, film and painting.

Sarah Wishart is interested in performance, photography, storytelling and the city & her PhD on “A Provenance of Performance: Excavating new art histories through a consideration of re-enactment and the perspectives of the audience” considered Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave and Graeme Miller’s Linked.