The introduction to Spirit in Mass at the Appledore Festival

Thank you for inviting me to show my film here. It is an honour to be part of such an exciting and dynamic festival in such a lovely place. This is only the second public screening of Spirit in Mass, which was launched in Oxford where I live; at the North Wall Arts Centre in April.

The film is the culmination of a project which has taken about 3 years to complete. It is my first film and I have learnt a huge amount in making it both about the process of making a documentary and about my father and his work.

Alan Thornhill is a little known sculptor who has produced a substantial body of work in clay over a 40 year period and he has devised an unusual and radical approach particularly to making figurative work. His commitment to his own process and the positive influence he has had both on students and on viewers of his exhibitions made me want to record both the work and his working philosophy for posterity.

On a personal level the project has given me the opportunity to get to know my father and his work better, while he is still alive and able to contribute to the project. Many people have said to me since how much they wish they had been able to do a project with one of their parents before they died. It has been very challenging on many levels, emotional and practical as well as technical, but I feel I have learnt and grown from the experience as an artist in my own right.

We began sitting in his studio with around 30 scraps of paper arranged in a circle, each with a theme from his work or life which I felt needed to be included. We shot a 3 hour interview with Alan, filmed his sculptures in various settings and interviewed his students. Although I had begun with a plan and a storyboard, the actual film grew and developed in an organic way through painstaking hours of editing on my laptop over 18 months and occasional interventions from Alan.  I am enormously grateful for the technical help I received from Oxford Film and Video Makers and various individuals who I met there, particularly Tony Preston Shrek and Ben Pritchett.

During the process of making the film it became clear that the sculptures are to be permanently installed later this year along the embankment in Wandsworth, South London , close to where they were made. This is an exciting and wonderful  tribute to the work and I hope that the film will enable people who see them there, as well as others who just see the film,  to understand more about the methods and rationale behind the work.  If you are interested, do go and see them yourselves some time in the future.  I hope you enjoy the film.

Anna Thornhill

Appledore June 2008

© Copyright Alan Thornhill and authors 2008. All rights reserved