About the Film

This memory and place documentary film follows artist Oliver Hoffmeister as he responds to Berwick-upon-Tweed for Hide and Seek, a painting series commissioned by Berwick Visual Arts. Rather than a straightforward artist profile, this memory and place documentary film stays close to Oliver’s own working method, from research and sketchbooks through to the finished paintings, letting him explain the process largely in his own words.

Researching a Place From a Distance

Oliver’s starting point was research rather than a studio visit to Berwick itself, working through archive footage and old photographs before he had properly got to know the town in person.

I was asked to respond to Berwick as a place. I used a lot of Pathé footage and black and white images of America’s past. There’s an interplay between that documentary material and my own fictitious reimaginings, little daydreams around the place.

That meant learning about somewhere while still being detached from it, an odd position for an artist to work from, but one that shaped the whole project, letting documentary fact and daydream sit side by side from the very beginning rather than being reconciled later. It is also exactly the tension a memory and place documentary film needs to hold onto rather than resolve too quickly.

The Queen, the Fisherman and the Salmon

Among the archive material Oliver found, one small, almost throwaway moment stuck with him, a fisherman presenting a prize catch to a visiting member of the Royal Family who, as it turned out, did not particularly want it.

She’s gone for a Scottish tour and comes back through Berwick. Lots of crowds have turned out, and she gets to meet a few of the locals, one of whom is this fisherman who’s caught this fish. And then she’s just like, oh no, she doesn’t like salmon. There’s this pure look of, well, I tried, and he smiles through the pain. The idea that that’s been immortalised on film is great.

It is exactly the kind of detail that would otherwise have vanished from history entirely, and it says a lot about what draws Oliver to archive footage in the first place, not the grand set-piece moments but the small, human, slightly awkward ones.

Working in Black and White

Much of the archive material Oliver draws on is black and white, a choice that turns out to be practical as well as aesthetic, and one this memory and place documentary film leans into throughout its own visual palette.

I think my brain only really works with values, not colours, so over time these images can merge together without the contrast of colour getting in the way. It’s an easier visual language for my head to process into new images.

Objects, Not Flat Surfaces

Postcards feature heavily in Oliver’s research, valued as much for their physical presence as for the images printed on them.

I look at art as objects as well, not just a flat surface with dirt rubbed on it. It’s got sides, it’s got weight, it’s got presence.

That same thinking carries into how he talks about a finished painting, as a paint layer sitting on top of, and inseparable from, the frame or support it is built onto, a way of seeing objects that this memory and place documentary film tries to stay attentive to throughout.

Starting With a Scribble

Oliver was candid about the hardest part of the process, one that has little to do with Berwick specifically and everything to do with beginning any piece of work at all.

The hardest part about painting, or any art, is starting, because of that innate fear of the blank page. Doing a small sketch or a scribble here and there helps get that first step going, so that nothing is set in stone and everything stays movable.

For Oliver, watercolour sketches are never the finished piece, only a way of thinking things through on paper before the real decisions get made elsewhere, which is exactly the kind of unglamorous, unfinished moment a memory and place documentary film is best placed to capture.

A Conversation With the Canvas

Once the first marks are down, Oliver described the process shifting into something closer to a dialogue than a plan being carried out.

Once I’ve made those initial marks, I relinquish the initial idea. That’s the start of the conversation between me and the painting, like an initial hello, and I’m just waiting for the painting to talk back.

Working on several paintings side by side, rather than finishing one before starting the next, turned out to matter more than expected, letting motifs surface across pieces that might otherwise have stayed invisible, exactly the kind of connective detail a memory and place documentary film can trace that a single finished canvas can’t show on its own.

It’s been a real help to work on multiple pieces at once. You notice motifs recurring as you move between paintings with the same brush and the same palette.

Why “Hide and Seek”

The title was a deliberate choice, drawing on a game everyone already understands to describe an exhibition that deliberately withholds a tidy explanation of itself.

Hide and seek is an inherently understood game. Hopefully you’ll go into the show understanding it’s about Berwick, but not really understanding the relationship between the works, and you’ll have to make up your own mind. Whether they find the meaning I was seeking, or a meaning that’s entirely their own, is something purely personal, and that’s important.

Filming an Artist’s Process for Exhibition or Funding

Hide and Seek is a useful example of what an artist documentation film can actually offer, beyond a simple record of finished work. Most of what makes the film interesting isn’t the paintings themselves, which any exhibition photograph could show, but the research, the false starts, the daydreaming and the slow back-and-forth Oliver describes between himself and the canvas. That is the part a funder, curator or gallery visitor can’t get from looking at a finished piece on a wall.

For artists thinking about commissioning something similar, it is worth separating two related but slightly different jobs. The first, and generally the stronger option, is a film built around an exhibition itself, giving a body of work context, a voice and a sense of process that a private view night alone rarely manages to capture, and which keeps working as a document long after the show has come down. The second is documentation aimed specifically at grant or funding applications, where panels are often assessing a body of practice rather than a single output, and a well-made process film can demonstrate genuine development, decision-making and rigour in a way that a written proposal alone struggles to.

Both are legitimate reasons to commission an artist documentation film, and the two overlap more than they differ, since the same honest, unhurried approach to filming a working process tends to serve either purpose well. What doesn’t tend to work, for either use case, is treating the film as an afterthought squeezed in around a private view, since the material worth having, the research, the sketchbooks, the conversation with the canvas, is almost always found earlier in the process than that.

Why This Film Matters

Hide and Seek is one of the projects I’m genuinely proud of, not because of anything dramatic in the process, but because Oliver let the film sit as close to his actual working method as any artist film I have made so far. There’s no tidy narrative imposed over the top, just sketchbooks, archives and paint finding their way toward something neither fully documentary nor fully imagined, which feels true to how the finished paintings themselves work too. It is a reminder that a good artist film doesn’t always need a dramatic arc or a big reveal, sometimes the most honest version of a project is simply staying close enough, for long enough, that the ordinary rhythm of the work becomes visible on its own terms.