About the Film

This film poem documentary reimagines a moment in the life of Margaret Rebecca Dickinson, a 19th-century botanical artist who left behind hundreds of exquisite plant portraits but almost nothing of herself. With no surviving portrait of her own and very little personal record, poet Linda France imagines her way into Dickinson’s world through a lyrical response to her 1874 field trip to Holy Island.

Margaret Rebecca Dickinson

Dickinson’s watercolours and collected specimens survive in far greater number than any trace of the woman who made them. The film uses that gap, between the careful detail of her botanical work and the near total silence around her own life, as its starting point. The Northumberland landscape she once walked becomes a kind of fragile bridge back to her, standing in for a portrait that was never made.

She worked across the Border Counties in the second half of the nineteenth century, recording wildflowers and plants with the same care other artists might give to portraiture. Botanical illustration of this kind rarely earned much recognition in its own right, and even less was kept of the women who produced it. What remains of Dickinson is almost entirely her work, precise and patient, but unsigned in any way that tells you much about who she actually was.

Linda France’s Poem

The poem, Portrait of the Artist as an Island Flower, was first published in Waves and Bones (NCLA, Newcastle University, 2018), and grew out of Linda’s research into Dickinson’s work as part of her Creative Practice PhD, Women on the Edge of Landscape. That research later became The Knucklebone Floor (Smokestack, 2022), which won the Laurel Prize for outstanding nature and environmental poetry, awarded by Simon Armitage.

Making a Film Poem Documentary

Filming a poem asks for a different rhythm to most documentary work. There is less interest in driving a narrative forward and more in holding space for something to be felt rather than explained. For this film I kept the kit stripped back and stayed responsive, watching for passing light on stone, movement in the grass, the slow drift of cloud, rather than working from a fixed shot list.

I try to bring that same quality of attention to most of the films I make, listening as much as recording, and letting the images come from paying close attention rather than chasing a predetermined shot. With a film poem documentary especially, there is rarely a tidy conclusion to reach for. What you are left with is more of an atmosphere, a question, a thread of feeling, which suited this subject well. Dickinson’s life resists a neat ending, and so does the film.

Films like this sit close to what I enjoy most, working alongside someone else’s creative response to a place or a person, rather than building the whole thing from my own research alone. Linda had already spent years with Dickinson’s work by the time we filmed, and that depth of attention comes through in ways a shorter engagement never could. My job was mostly to stay out of the way of it, and to find images that could hold the same quiet charge as her words.

About The Maltings and Linda France

This film was commissioned by The Maltings for Margaret Rebecca Dickinson: A Botanical Artist of the Border Counties, an exhibition at The Granary Gallery in Berwick running from October 2022 to February 2023. Linda France was named Environmental Poet of the Year 2022-23 in the Michael Marks Awards, and her tenth collection, Startling (Faber & New Writing North, 2022), grew out of her three-year Writing the Climate residency with New Writing North and Newcastle University. You can find out more about her work at lindafrance.co.uk.