About the Film

This video installation documentary film follows Hiker Meat, an exhibition by artist Jamie Shovlin at The Fishmarket Gallery in Northampton. The installation surrounded visitors with sixty vintage televisions, each playing fragments of an imagined film, while hidden speakers filled the gallery with screams, music and disjointed dialogue. Filming it meant finding a way to capture both the overwhelming scale of the piece and the fine detail of how it had been put together, a challenge quite different from the more straightforward artist portraits and studio films I usually make.

A Film That Was Never Made

At the centre of Hiker Meat is a contradiction that Jamie explained during filming. The piece presents itself as the work of a director whose films vanished from circulation after 1980, yet it is entirely invented, assembled from genuine film clips, rewritten scripts and newly composed music. Watching him talk through the installation, it became clear that the real subject was not the fictional film itself but how audiences build cultural memory around things that were never quite real to begin with.

Deconstructing Cult Cinema

Hiker Meat draws on the video nasties era of the late 1970s and early 80s, breaking cult film down into its component parts. Each television in the gallery focused on a familiar genre trope, a masked killer under neon light, a shocking finale, an unsettling dream sequence, rather than presenting anything as a finished narrative. Shovlin described the piece as a composite of a film’s construction, revealing how viewers instinctively stitch stories together in their own minds. Filming this deconstruction meant treating the gallery itself as the subject, moving through the maze of screens and overlapping audio rather than settling on any single point.

Authorship and Memory

Beyond its visual scale, Hiker Meat raises questions about authorship and how culture remembers, or misremembers, its own history. Jamie spoke about these invented lost films as historical artefacts that have taken on a kind of afterlife precisely because they were maligned or forgotten, and about his interest in work that exists on the margins, rarely seen yet still carrying weight as legend. He also talked about films like The Centerfold Dwarf, an obscure early 1970s Swedish production, as an example of the kind of daring, difficult work that culture has largely left behind.

Filming an Immersive Installation

Technically, Hiker Meat was an ambitious undertaking. Installing sixty domestic televisions required a custom power circuit strong enough for two small houses, and filming meant moving through a maze of flickering screens and overlapping sound rather than a single clean space. Shovlin also created an imaginary German industrial band called Lost, whose music runs through the piece, drawing on the DIY, cassette-sharing ethos of the early 1980s underground. Capturing both the visual chaos and the soundscape mattered as much as filming Jamie himself, and that balance between atmosphere and interview is something I still think about whenever I take on a video installation documentary film in a gallery setting.

Why This Project Mattered

Projects on this scale are a reminder that ambitious, demanding art does not only happen in London or Manchester. The Fishmarket Gallery’s willingness to host something as technically complex as Hiker Meat meant audiences in Northampton had access to work that could easily have been overlooked outside a major city. It followed a similar spirit to Feast of Fools, an earlier exhibition documentary I made at the same gallery, and this video installation documentary film remains one of the more unusual and rewarding projects from my early years as a filmmaker.

Few of the gallery and exhibition films I have made since have matched Hiker Meat’s sheer physical scale or the strangeness of its central idea. You can see more of Jamie Shovlin’s work via Saatchi Gallery.