RITUAL

RITUAL (2024) is an abstract film made for Alternative Layers at Bridewell Studios. Bridewell was once a police station, and the former cells are now studio spaces - a shift I find both fascinating and haunting. Making work in that context led me to think about the lives that passed through the building, and about how incarceration often intersects with addiction, mental distress, and trauma - especially in periods where support was limited or punitive.

The film considers addiction through the lens of confinement: not only physical incarceration, but the psychological and temporal architectures that can form around repetition, compulsion, and routine. It is intentionally non-literal, structured through rhythm and recurrence, allowing meaning to sit in atmosphere rather than explanation.

It was made through an autoethnographic process, evocative and performative: lived experience is present as a shaping force, but not as content to be extracted and named. I’m interested in the line between what is lived in the making and what is offered to an audience, and in abstraction as a way of holding what is difficult without explaining it.