ARTIST STATEMENT
“Without darkness we cannot know the light.
I tell myself this as I cry. Nothing bad has happened yet which is the problem. The realisation that everything cannot stay the same, that world could just freeze and stay still, that I and all the people I love most cannot be forever alive, forever in bliss.
But I Know this cannot happen, that I will change and they will change, and death will gently come collect us from our doors. As I know deep down that without pain we cannot know joy. The world is a balance and we are all connected, we are born so we must die; I know this, but I still find it hard to swallow.
But grief is the price of love, and I know with the amount I have been shown and feel that the grief will be overwhelming. And I think that is the real reason I cry.” (Dyes Shepherd, 2023)
‘Death is a lover’ (McCarthy 2006). The Hollowing is about connection. The strings that bind us all together, a reminder of where we come from and where we are going. It shows the balances, the scales of fate; without nature there would not be growth, without sex no life, without grief no love and without death no meaning to existence.
Through the lens of a 1970’s folk horror film this, this short film and stills explore the intersection between sex and death through a female gaze, instead of treating death as spectacle, conquest, or abstraction, this lens emphasizes relationship, embodiment, and emotional continuity. This stylistic choice was made to honor the trope throughout this genre of transitions, from life to death, girl to women and the thresholds between states of being. Folk horror allows The Hollowing to root itself in the mystical of ritual, nature and the individuals experience of the collective. Nature is imperative to the story that is being told, shot in the New Forest, it shows we are entangled with the earth, and dying is just a returning to it in the end.
Following the five stages of death coined by Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, we get to witness the eventual acceptance that death comes for us all and the freedom in knowing and embodying this. Showing death is just a continuation of the cyclical cycle of life.
Dedicated to the matriarchs of the families and the women that have come before us, Ma Dyes speaks about her life in the background, grounding you in memories now gone, through personal history that will be passed down by spoken word, retained and relayed through generations, showing that we live forever through others.
The Hollowing is a surrealist fever dream, personifying death, showing us a different version of what we have been taught and to fear, amplifying that it is just another transition that links us all together.
Thank you to my models, Edith and Rowan.
And thank you to William and Hollie who made this possible.