Hart of the Wood: the film installations at Newstead Abbey inspired by forest folklore

It’s a Monday morning and I have been warmly invited into the West Bridgford workshop and lab of filmmaker Benjamin Wigley. Situated in a converted garage beside the house, the walls are dotted with artwork, sketches, and posters of Benjamin’s previous film projects, while the workbenches are stacked with strange instruments, vintage knickknacks, and an assortment of analogue film-making equipment. There’s a large box of wooden bones tucked under a table and some slightly unsettling carved masks grin menacingly from around the room. It's a wonderfully tactile and creative space.

Despite being a place where films are made, there aren’t screens full of flashy editing software cluttering this creative hideaway, but instead a selection of reel-to-reel contraptions that lie in wait for delicate film to be processed and carefully fed through into them. At Newstead, the Hart of the Wood films also inhabit their own peculiar spaces. Encased in sculptures inspired by kinetoscopes – an early film screening device developed in the late 19th century by Thomas Edison’s lab. The viewer is invited to step onto a short ladder, lift their head into a box and wind a handle to make the films play, giving an all-encompassing experience that shuts out the surrounding environment for a short time.

“I wanted to bring film into the landscape,” Benjamin explains. “When I began making them, people were thinking about apps and augmented reality, but my point was for people not to be on their phones. So the idea was to almost stick your head inside a tree, and then once you've experienced that thing, you're able to re-look at that same place with a different imagination.”

With a background in fine art and intermedia, Benjamin went to study 16mm film at NO.W.HERE, an artist-run film production space in Bethnal Green. He began experimenting with kinetoscope technology around ten years ago, slowly building towards Hart of the Wood with various iterations, improvements and discoveries along the way as both his collaborations formed and technology progressed. 

Working with Matt Little, an electronic and electrical engineer, to develop the technology, Benjamin talks about the creative process of trial and error; learning how to make old film durable enough to last outside in the elements, experimenting with developing solutions made from plants, creating mechanisms so viewers could power the film themselves without electricity, and balancing the recorded soundscapes with the noisy interference of the hand crank. 

There are numerous elements to Hart of the Wood, from story to sound. Although the project has been led by Benjamin, collaboration has been integral, with inventors, woodworkers, sound artists, poets and performers all bringing their own skills to the mix. Among them are Nathaniel Robin Mann, a folk musician and ‘sonic adventurer’ who gives a phantasmic performance. Ethereal vocals are provided by award-winning folk singer Lisa Knapp, artist Stephen Jon Cooper brings yet more layers to the production with ancient looking masks, and handcrafted instruments called ‘wind wands’ were created by Sneinton Market woodworker Martin Somerville. This meeting of minds shows the depth of thought and knowledge that the project is steeped in.

Having delved briefly into how the films were created, we then move into the why. Originally made in Comer Woods, situated in the Dudmaston Estate in Shropshire, the films were produced to mark forty years of ownership under the National Trust. In June this year Nottingham City Museums & Galleries invited Benjamin to show the work at Newstead Abbey. Three films, which are around three minutes each, can be found in the gardens, and are centred around autumn, winter and spring, whilst a fourth, longer, summer-themed film is available to watch inside the historic house.

With the flickering medium of 16mm film, and the escape into the kinetoscope, the films have a spellbinding atmosphere that is as alluring as it is unsettling. Sigils made of bones, eyes chalked on trees, otherworldly vocals and chants all evoke a time when humans had a much deeper connection to ritual, the forest and nature. There are moments of obscured familiarity, like the feeling of a dream slipping away, and flickers of foreboding, like flashes of a nightmare.

I ask Benjamin about the somewhat sinister element to the imagery. Is this pure storytelling and dramatics, or is there something deeper within folklore and our connection to the wilderness of forests that is inherently dark?

“The first fairy tales were often propaganda to stop people going into the woods, and that has had an impact on the way that societies have perceived these spaces - they were often scared, so some of the visual language has to be connected with that in many ways. But also, there's a legacy to a time where there was a transition from Paganism to the Christian religion, and the tension that caused,” says Benjamin. 

Within the work, several archetypes can be seen; Gaia, the personification of Mother Earth, the titular stag which represents a link to the otherworld, and the Green Man, who symbolises rebirth and the cycles of nature. Benjamin explains how Stephen Jon Cooper brought a new character into the mix: ‘Long Tongue’, a malicious looking masked figure who, during the winter chapter, spars with the Green Man and chops off his head.

The imagery verges on folk-horror, but Benjamin rejects this classification. “People do associate that kind of 16mm film language with horror, because that’s what we’ve got used to within cinema history, but for me it’s closer to a memory or a dream.” He goes on to suggest the films are instead “a warning to people as to what might happen - essentially, from our misuse and abuse of the planet.”

While A.I. begins to infiltrate our artforms and erase the vitally important creative journey, Hart of the Wood brings as much beauty to the process as the product. But that doesn’t mean that the project rejects the use of technology. Built into the kinetoscopes is the ability to log how many people have viewed the films; an audience of over 100,000 was recorded at Comer Woods and a further 10,000 in the first three months at Newstead. 

“The world is not built to show films of some forms, so you have to present it in a certain way,” Benjamin explains. “We’ve reached people who would never normally see this kind of strange, experimental film. If we were to get a cinema release we’d never be getting that number of people watching it.”

While cinemas provide modern comforts and flashy high definition blockbusters, step into the rabbit holes (or kinetoscopes) of our woodlands and there is a more quiet wonder to be found. Something both tangible and ephemeral, ancient and fleeting, and something with perhaps more heart.

Hart of the Wood can be seen at Newstead Abbey until 2026.

newsteadabbey.org.uk