About the Film

This map art documentary film follows printmaker Rachael Clewlow as she creates new work for the Lumen Print Collection, a permanent collection of original prints curated by Northern Print for The Lumen, a large new office building in Newcastle’s Helix Quarter. Filmed during the first lockdown of 2020, it is one of six artist profiles I made for the collection, alongside films with Sarah Duncan, Katherine Jones, Nick Loaring, Anja Percival and Eunice Routledge, each responding to the same central theme of light.

A Route Traced Back to Joseph Swan

Clewlow’s piece for Lumen is built around the life of Joseph Swan, the Newcastle chemist and physicist who developed the first practical incandescent light bulb and first showed it in public at the Literary and Philosophical Society on Westgate Road in February 1879. Swan’s house, Underhill in Low Fell, Gateshead, was the first private house in the world wired for domestic electric light, and nearby Mosley Street became the first street in the world lit by electricity. He later opened a light bulb factory at Benwell. Given the building’s name and its theme of light, Swan was an obvious starting point, and Clewlow used his biography almost as a route map, walking to the sites in Newcastle and Gateshead that mattered in his life and work.

Turning a Walk Into a Map

Clewlow’s practice generally works with maps, charts and diagrams, and this piece follows a working method she uses across her practice, the same method that makes her work a natural subject for a map art documentary film in the first place. As she walks a route, she keeps a running written record of anything that catches her attention along the way, a monument, a fire station, a delivery van, a man falling off his bike, each one logged with a time and a short description. Back in the studio, every one of those points is plotted onto an actual map and then redrawn digitally, with each stop given its own grid reference. The finished commission for Lumen, titled Colour Register Map No.1 and its companion print Colour Register Key No.1 (Sites of Significance, Joseph Swan), is built from 128 of these points, each shown as a pair of concentric circles on the map, linked to a key that lists every location in order alongside a coloured line coding it back to the map. It is not a record of Swan’s own journey so much as her own journey through the places associated with him, translated into a visual language that looks like cartography without being bound to it.

Light Made Physical

What sets this particular piece apart from Clewlow’s usual process is how directly it uses light itself as material. For the first time in her practice, she worked from photographs taken at each stop, partly as a nod to Swan’s own pioneering work in dry plate photography, and used the actual colours in those images, the real light of that time of day, at that place, to build her colour palette. Rather than mixing colours from memory or instinct back in the studio, the palette came straight from what the camera had recorded on the day. She described it herself as something new for her:

“It was a direct transfer of light and colour into the work, which is something I’ve never done before, and I’m really pleased.”

That distinction matters more than it might sound. Clewlow calls the whole approach a kind of pseudoscience, borrowing the discipline of data recording and applying it to something that is, in the end, an interpretation rather than a measurement. The grid references, timestamps and colour samples give the work a scaffolding of method, but the map itself is deliberately not a usable map, it is her own account of a place and a time, built to be read rather than navigated by. Clewlow’s wider practice, built from years of these walked diaries, can be seen on her Axisweb profile.

Filming a Solitary, Data-Driven Practice: My Approach

Most of what makes Clewlow’s work interesting happens somewhere a camera cannot easily follow, in the decision to note one detail rather than another, in the slow accumulation of a notebook full of times and place names that will not mean anything to anyone else until they are turned into a print months later. A map art documentary film like this one only really works if it accepts that the most important part of the process is largely invisible, and builds itself around the parts that are visible instead, the walking, the looking, the photographing, the writing, without pretending the camera is capturing the whole of what is going on in her head.

In practice that meant following her on foot around Newcastle and Gateshead, shooting handheld and close, catching her noticing things rather than staging her noticing things, so the film’s own rhythm of stopping and looking would echo hers. Filming during the first lockdown added its own constraints, a smaller crew, more distance, more improvising around a city that was quieter than usual, and in some ways that suited a project built entirely around one person’s solitary attention to a place. Northern Print’s director, Anna Wilkinson, spoke at the time about how fitting the theme of light felt for that particular year, and filming Clewlow’s walk was a useful reminder that a documentary can carry some of that context without needing to spell it out.

For a project like Lumen, where six artists were each commissioned to make permanent work for the same public building, documenting the process alongside the finished print matters for a fairly practical reason. A viewer standing in front of the finished piece, a grid of coloured circles next to a key of place names, has very little to go on without some account of how it was made. The film gives Northern Print and the building itself something to point people toward, a record of the method behind an otherwise abstract-looking piece of art, and a way of understanding Clewlow’s practice that the print alone cannot quite provide.