The Ghost of Stanley Spencer watches over me
2006
16mm film, mute, 12 minutes, looped
The film documents the artist, walking through ‘Fergusons’ shipyard in Port Glasgow, where Stanley Spencer was resident during the second world war. It is filmed with a high-speed film camera, from directly above the subject..The camera seems to adopt the point of view of a disembodied eye, floating above the shipyard warehouse. As the camera pans the workfloor, we lose our sense of scale, and the space seems transformed into a small maquette. Neville attempts to transform the surface of the shipyard, as Spencer had done, into a painting, with his transformation referencing the reliefs of Ben Nicholson, and the mark-making of British Abstraction.
Commissioned by Tramway, Glasgow, for the exhibition ‘What Makes You and I Different’