A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things

By Jen McLaren, 07.10.2024

Mark Cousins Grindelwald, credit Adam Dawtrey

A new award-winning documentary by Edinburgh-based filmmaker Mark Cousins explores the fascinating mind of Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.

‘A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things’ focuses on a day that changed her life and art irrevocably. Cousins is particularly interested in how it affected her brain as she was also synaesthetic – associating letters, names and people with particular colours.

In May 1949, Barns-Graham and her party picked their way across the Grindelwald glacier in Switzerland where she had an epiphany, later producing an extraordinary cycle of paintings inspired by what she had seen. The film explores how her neurodiversity and her encounter with the glacier shaped her vision of the world.

“I first saw her work around 1989 and I could tell that I had an affinity with her; her interest in rigour, in structure and mathematics,” Cousins explains. “I knew about her glacier epiphany, because when you learn about Willie, it's one of the first things you hear. They are her most famous works, so I knew that she had this road to Damascus encounter with the glacier. As I try to say in the film, Willie’s brain was ready – primed for it – she was turning over, ready for something epic to happen.”

Known to her friends as Willie, Barns-Graham was born in St Andrews in 1912 and after studying at Edinburgh College of Art, moved to Cornwall where she became a prominent member of the St Ives school, alongside Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo.

From the 1960s, she kept studios in both St Andrews and St Ives, as well as travelling significantly in Europe, drawing inspiration and insight from the landscapes and seascapes she came across along the way. She passed away in 2004 aged 91.

Her career spanned over 60 years and a plaque was unveiled in St Andrews earlier this year to commemorate the 20th anniversary of her death. Two books have also been published: children’s book ‘An Introduction to the life of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’, by Kate Temple and Annabel Wright, and also the recently-released ‘Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: The Glaciers’, edited by Rob Airey, which is the first comprehensive account of Barns-Graham's life-long artistic response to the Grindelwald glacier.

In the years since Barns-Graham visited the Swiss glacier, it has retreated by a mile and is now almost gone. When Cousins travelled there to film, he had to walk much further from Grindelwald village to reach it.

While working on the film, Mark was also inspired to create video-based artwork ‘Like A Huge Scotland’, which ran at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery in 2022 for the month of November. The multi-screen installation imagined a conversation about the glacier visit between an older Barns-Graham and her younger self. The installation is now due to travel to Shanghai.

“I was delighted with it. It seemed to really touch people, there were a lot of repeat attenders, and quite a lot of tears. I think the Fruitmarket were really pleased at the emotional reaction to it,” says Cousins.

Earlier this year, ‘A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things’ won the top prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic. It was the first time a documentary had won the prize – and also the first time for a Scottish film. “We were delighted, it really helps the film and I was thrilled and very moved at the idea that this will help Willie's reputation,” Mark explains.

He hopes the film will help to raise Barns-Graham’s profile outside of the UK – where she is still little-known – placing her in an international context. “Even a lot of people in Scotland haven't heard of Willie unfortunately, but that's changing thanks to the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust. The language of 20th century art was a global language, and the more we can contextualise her in that broader field, it extracts her a little bit from St Ives.”

With the assistance of the Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust in Edinburgh, Cousins was given access to the artist’s sketchbooks and notebooks. This is the first time their content has ever been filmed and they provide a fascinating insight into her creative thought processes. Actress Tilda Swinton features as the voice of Barns-Graham, reading excerpts from her letters and diaries throughout. Meanwhile, Mark uses his own voiceover to question perceptions of Barns-Graham and interrogate the inspirations behind her creative output.

“For me as a filmmaker there are a lot of conventional ways of making arts documentaries. I try to avoid them often in my work. I think the biggest compliment you can pay an artist is to ask how their imagination worked and not put them in smaller categories,” he explains. “I needed to look at her imagination and how it worked, how she thought visually, that's a theme in, I think, all my works, whether it's films or books, it's the visual imagination – how it works. If you have tendencies in that direction yourself, you're attracted to other visual thinkers.”

He goes on: “I am very suspicious of the objective, usually male voice. There's no such thing as objectivity, and in literature there's the idea of the super reader, the perfect reader of a book who knows all the sociology and the linguistics. We're all subjective, and in most of my work there is a subjectivity – a kind of personal connection, and you're always looking for that.”

The film also highlights the fact Barns-Graham looked at the world differently than many of her contemporaries. “What's fascinating is what she didn't paint: you go to the Alps and you don't paint the Alps, you go to Orkney and you don't paint the famous Old Man of Hoy? She's constantly looking down at the land beneath her feet, so in that way she's

more comparable to a geologist,” Mark says. “I think she enjoyed the fact that colours and numbers were connected for her and not for other people. That's why she could take a religious song and turn it into a colour grid. When it's obvious to you that a number has a colour, most of the rest of the world doesn't see that. That's fascinating – that's an extra reason for making art. To show that which, without you, might never have been seen.”

 

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is released in UK cinemas from 18th October 2024. Find out more about screenings here: https://www.conic.film/films/glimpse