Luke Fowler (b. 1978) is an artist, filmmaker and musician based in Glasgow. Recipient of accolades such as the 2008 Jarman Award, Fowler is currently a Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow. Combining aspects of structural cinema with documentary techniques, Fowler’s films shatter the limits and conventions of standard nonfiction filmmaking. Working with archival footage, 16mm film shot by himself and sound recordings made in collaboration with renowned sound artists, he complexly constructs and weaves these elements into film portraits of various “outsiders” such as radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, experimental composer Cornelius Cardew, Marxist historian E.P. Thompson and environmentalist recluse Bogman Palmjaguar. Fowler’s own films and influences draw equally from experimental music, the British Free Cinema movement of the 1950s, and 1970s structural film—in particular the work of Robert Beavers and Gregory Markopoulos. Fowler has cultivated a strong body of work that continues to rapidly grow alongside a multifaceted artistic practice that makes him one of the more dynamic and exciting artists working today. – Jeremy Rossen

The sensibility behind many of these works is that of the auto-didact. The work begins with self-reflection, intuition, research. It then fans out into several encounters; with an archive, a place, individuals or a community. The works often revolve around a specific landscape or cultural milieu that I invite the spectator to inhabit, at least for the duration given. In the various portrait films I have made, I reject conventional narrative trappings- substituting them instead for a dialectical montage that recognizes the contradictions and complexities of social and psychological life. During the editing, I am striving to find a form which is an equivalent for the content, the nature of the material and my own experiences, during filming. In these works I hope to transmit to the viewer my own convictions about an individual or movement whose values have largely been dismissed, marginalized or mis-recognized by society at large.  Within the two programs you will find variously; meditations on ideology, memory, politics, listening, physical phenomena... and the whole messy business of representation.