ARTISTS
Hilary Lloyd and Dennis Potter: Seeing the Blossom
Seeing the Blossom centres on Dennis Potter鈥檚 鈥榝inal interview鈥�, which is shown in its entirety. Conducted by broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, the interview aired on Channel 4 just weeks before the writer and dramatist鈥檚 death in 1994.
Recorded with the knowledge that he was dying, the interview represented an extraordinary epitaph delivered by Potter himself. Examining his long career in television, the legacy of the post-war settlement, and the impact of media on democracy, Potter鈥檚 analysis of public life and political discontent crackles with prescience.
The interview is arguably the notoriously exacting dramatist's final, virtuoso performance. Filmed on a largely empty television set, the sparse staging comprised two chairs and a side table for Potter鈥檚 cigarettes, champagne and the liquid morphine he relied on to control his pain. While the conversation ranges between politics, childhood, and religion, Potter's discussions of his experiences with chronic illness and mortality are most striking.
The lucidity with which he discusses his own death was startling at the time, and over thirty years later, it remains deeply emotive. In one of the interview鈥檚 most memorable passages, Potter recalls the blossom in his garden that Spring as "...the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn鈥檛 seem to matter".
The interview is presented alongside Hilary Lloyd鈥檚 video Blossom (2017). The work, which employs a static camera and single take, captures a swaying floral, brightened and blurred to pink impressions by hot white sunlight. By focusing on this singular motif, Lloyd enacts a slow and attentive gaze that balances stillness and motion, as well as affective close-up with distanced observation.
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Seeing the Blossom centres on Dennis Potter鈥檚 鈥榝inal interview鈥�, which is shown in its entirety. Conducted by broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, the interview aired on Channel 4 just weeks before the writer and dramatist鈥檚 death in 1994.
Recorded with the knowledge that he was dying, the interview represented an extraordinary epitaph delivered by Potter himself. Examining his long career in television, the legacy of the post-war settlement, and the impact of media on democracy, Potter鈥檚 analysis of public life and political discontent crackles with prescience.
The interview is arguably the notoriously exacting dramatist's final, virtuoso performance. Filmed on a largely empty television set, the sparse staging comprised two chairs and a side table for Potter鈥檚 cigarettes, champagne and the liquid morphine he relied on to control his pain. While the conversation ranges between politics, childhood, and religion, Potter's discussions of his experiences with chronic illness and mortality are most striking.
The lucidity with which he discusses his own death was startling at the time, and over thirty years later, it remains deeply emotive. In one of the interview鈥檚 most memorable passages, Potter recalls the blossom in his garden that Spring as "...the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. Things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn鈥檛 seem to matter".
The interview is presented alongside Hilary Lloyd鈥檚 video Blossom (2017). The work, which employs a static camera and single take, captures a swaying floral, brightened and blurred to pink impressions by hot white sunlight. By focusing on this singular motif, Lloyd enacts a slow and attentive gaze that balances stillness and motion, as well as affective close-up with distanced observation.
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