Drift (2025) Single Screen 7mins 25 secs
Shot on Super 8 -50D and TrI X hand processed film
Drift forms part of Tessa Garland’s ongoing research into fragile, transitional places and how they are shaped by time, movement, and human presence. The work focuses on a low lying sand bank island on the Ria Formosa Portugal - a site that is vulnerable, where environmental conditions and material traces are constantly shifting. Garland’s approach is informed by her sculptural background, allowing physical engagement with place, objects, and process to shape the structure of the work rather than a fixed narrative.
Shot on Super 8 film in both colour and black and white, with sections hand-processed using caffenol, Drift 2025 documents a slow walk around a low-lying sandbank island. The sequence is built from brief observations that appear and disappear, reflecting the precarious nature of the site. Repeated rotations and cycles run through the work, while sea-worn, foraged objects suggest accumulated histories and ongoing human impact. Prehistoric-looking cacti punctuate the island, contributing to its unfamiliar and slightly dislocated character. The grain and material qualities of analogue film reinforce the sense of instability and impermanence that underpins the work, positioning Drift as both a record of place and a process-led investigation into fragility and change.
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Extracted text by Martin Holman for Art Cornwall online journal, Second Nature at Tremenheere Gallery and Sculpture Gardens, Cornwall
'If Gomez was introducing mythical shapeshifting in his enchanted fiction, Tessa Garland (above) was shifting from physical media from to the virtual. She channels her sculptural investigation through a camera lens onto Super 8 film. Her work Drift and Island Garden inserts an alternative space to the interior of the gallery, one in another location entirely, shaped by nature into a kind of barrenness and elaborated by culture. The first is a sandbank under blue sky populated by plants suited to dry climates. Cacti and such-like have intrigued shapes, a property carried into the second, man-made element in this unknown habitat. Mobile assemblages shot at angles rotated a concatenation of stuff. Maybe all had been found abandoned and gathered in beachcomber style. Bicycle wheels, clear plastic trays, marine floats and ties assume a new purpose, although that is hard to identify, as putative machines from a Rowland Emmett world. Are they meant to ward off intruders, like decoys, or reel in the imagination? For sound is part of Garland’s assemblage; so is the grainy texture of her type of film stock and its warm tone suggesting a work from the past. A surrealist—inflected sensibility suffuses this 'Island Garden', setting it in indefinite time.'
'If Gomez was introducing mythical shapeshifting in his enchanted fiction, Tessa Garland (above) was shifting from physical media from to the virtual. She channels her sculptural investigation through a camera lens onto Super 8 film. Her work Drift and Island Garden inserts an alternative space to the interior of the gallery, one in another location entirely, shaped by nature into a kind of barrenness and elaborated by culture. The first is a sandbank under blue sky populated by plants suited to dry climates. Cacti and such-like have intrigued shapes, a property carried into the second, man-made element in this unknown habitat. Mobile assemblages shot at angles rotated a concatenation of stuff. Maybe all had been found abandoned and gathered in beachcomber style. Bicycle wheels, clear plastic trays, marine floats and ties assume a new purpose, although that is hard to identify, as putative machines from a Rowland Emmett world. Are they meant to ward off intruders, like decoys, or reel in the imagination? For sound is part of Garland’s assemblage; so is the grainy texture of her type of film stock and its warm tone suggesting a work from the past. A surrealist—inflected sensibility suffuses this 'Island Garden', setting it in indefinite time.'