I. The original night, 2023-24

The Original Night is a 16mm artist film project documenting Scotland’s waning population of wallabies.

Located on Inchconnchan in Loch Lomond, a small colony of wallabies have resided on the uninhabited island since being introduced by the Countess of Arran in the 1940s; once part of her private collection of animals. Almost a century later however, proposals have been put forward to cull the wallabies, which has divided the local community, and raised broader questions around the perceived ecological and environmental damage caused by 'alien' species. In light of a petition launched in 2022 to “Save the wallabies of Loch Lomond”, the fate of the colony will be debated in parliament in 2023.

In view of their likely demise, The Original Night looks to create a final portrait of Europe's last wallaby population, told through three semi-fictionalised 'acts'. In doing so, the project explores humans’ longstanding fixation with the visual documentation of animals, that spans the inception of the cinematic form in Eadward Muybridge's studies of animals in motion, to France's ancient cave paintings. Not only artefact's of film's genealogy, such histories, chronicling America's wild horses, and Europe's bears and mammoths, are further bound by paralleling the decline of their subjects.