Arts Videographer Explores Hiker Meat by Jamie Shovlin: A Wild Ride into Cult Cinema and Collective Imagination
As an arts videographer, I’ve just completed my new film, Hiker Meat by Jamie Shovlin, which explores his extraordinary exhibition at The Fishmarket Gallery in Northampton.
Working as an arts videographer allows me to dive into creative worlds that blur the lines between fact and fiction, high art and cult cinema. This film has been one of the true highlights of my early career and an important project for documenting the vibrant Midlands arts scene.
Jamie Shovlin’s Hiker Meat is far more than a traditional art exhibition—it’s an immersive and cinematic spectacle. Stepping into the gallery, visitors are surrounded by sixty vintage televisions, each screen flickering with fragments of imagined films. Hidden speakers flood the space with screams, atmospheric music, and disjointed dialogue. As an arts videographer, capturing this environment on film presented a thrilling challenge. My goal was to convey both the overwhelming sensory experience and the fine details of Shovlin’s intricate installation.
At the heart of Hiker Meat lies a fascinating contradiction. As Jamie explains in my footage, the piece is both “a film by a director that Times Arts criticism says was only made in 1980 and has disappeared from circulation ever since,” and a completely fictional creation. It’s assembled from genuine film clips, rewritten scripts, and newly composed music. Projects like this remind me why being an arts videographer is so rewarding—it allows me to document how artists like Shovlin invent entirely new cultural histories from fragments of reality and imagination.
Hiker Meat deconstructs the DNA of cult films, especially those from the “video nasties” era of the late 1970s and early 80s. Each television monitor in the gallery focuses on classic genre tropes: masked killers in neon-lit streets, shocking finales, or eerie dream sequences. Rather than presenting a finished movie, Shovlin offers what he calls a “composite of the film’s construction,” revealing how audiences instinctively assemble narratives in their minds. For me, as an arts videographer, filming this deconstruction felt like capturing cinema in its raw, disassembled form.
Beyond the dazzling visuals, Hiker Meat digs into questions about authorship and cultural memory. Jamie describes these “lost” films as “historical artifacts that kind of have relationships now because they’ve been so historically maligned.” He’s fascinated by movies on the cultural fringes—films few people have seen, yet which live on as legends or myths in collective memory. Documenting these themes felt essential to my work as an arts videographer, preserving how artists engage with forgotten or hidden aspects of pop culture.
During filming, Jamie talked passionately about obscure films like The Centerfold Dwarf, a Swedish production from the early 1970s about a sadistic dwarf who imprisons women and forces them into prostitution. “You don’t really see things like that much anymore,” he said, noting how cultural shifts have left certain daring narratives behind.
Technically, Hiker Meat was an ambitious feat. Installing sixty domestic televisions required a custom power circuit strong enough to run two small houses. Moving through this maze of flickering screens and overlapping audio with my camera was like navigating a labyrinth of light and sound. Yet as an arts videographer, this kind of sensory overload is precisely what makes projects so rewarding—the challenge of translating physical, immersive art into the language of film.
Music is crucial in Hiker Meat as well. Shovlin created an imaginary German industrial band called Lost, whose music threads through the installation. This element connects to the DIY ethos of the late 70s and early 80s, when bands shared music via fan-supplied blank cassettes. As an arts videographer, capturing both the visuals and the soundscape was key to telling the full story of Shovlin’s vision.
Projects like Hiker Meat are vital for the Midlands arts scene, proving that ambitious, world-class art isn’t limited to London or Manchester. The Fishmarket Gallery’s decision to host such a complex show demonstrates that audiences deserve access to innovative, challenging art right on their doorstep. As an arts videographer, I’m grateful to document these cultural moments and help share them beyond gallery walls.
Hiker Meat is a thrilling fusion of academic curiosity, creative invention, and sensory immersion. Filming it was one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my early career—a wild journey into how we collectively imagine, remember, and reinvent cinema, even for films that never truly existed.