About the Film

This film is an example of what filming artworks in an artist’s studio can offer, the chance to capture not just a finished piece but the space, light and process that shaped it. It follows The Wardrobe Trunk, a wooden sculpture by Sunderland based sculptor Colin Wilbourn, filmed inside his own studio before the piece left for public display.

The Wardrobe Trunk

The Wardrobe Trunk is a carefully built wooden sculpture full of optical illusions, part furniture, part fable. In Wilbourn’s studio it stood quietly in the middle of the room like a forgotten heirloom, somewhere between a container, a vessel and a character in its own right. Was it holding memories, or offering a way into an imagined journey. That kind of open question is largely what draws me to this way of working: noticing what a piece suggests rather than settling on a single reading of it.

Colin Wilbourn’s Practice

Wilbourn’s work returns often to place, memory and transformation. He is known in the North East for earlier large scale public sculpture, including The River Wear Assemblage, made with Craig Knowles and Karl Fisher and installed along the river in Sunderland, and his individual practice carries the same sense of story and material sensitivity into smaller, quieter pieces, working mostly in reclaimed wood and stone. That contrast, between the public, civic scale of his earlier collaborations and the private, contained world of a piece like The Wardrobe Trunk, was part of what made the studio itself worth filming.

Filming in the Studio

This kind of work is mostly about slowing down. I filmed with three GH4 cameras and a Ronin gimbal, letting the light shift naturally across the sculpture and pausing on its textures, angles and joints rather than cutting quickly between them. Away from a public setting, the studio became something closer to a stage, a quiet space where the sculpture could sit and be looked at properly on its own terms, without a gallery label doing any of the explaining.

Why Studio Filming Matters

Documenting a piece in the studio catches it at a particular stage, before public display, before curation, before anyone else’s account of it gets layered on top. The work is still in close dialogue with its maker, sitting among the tools and the traces of earlier pieces. Filming artworks in a sculpture studio in Sunderland like Wilbourn’s means paying attention to the kind of detail that often gets lost once a piece is installed elsewhere, the craftsmanship, the material choices, the marks that tell you how something was actually made and, sometimes, remade.

A Portrait of the Creative Process

In the stillness of the studio, The Wardrobe Trunk felt less like a finished object and more like something caught mid transformation. That is close to what draws me back to filming artworks and the people who make them, not just recording how a piece looks, but how it holds attention, how it occupies a room, and how it might be read differently depending on who is looking. Those moments before a piece leaves the studio are where its visual story properly begins.