Ruminating on Seaweed: An Annotated Photo‐Essay. Exploring the Film‐Philosophy of Pierre Creton with the Seaweed‐Eating Sheep of North Ronaldsay

Abstract

In 1993, recently graduated filmmaker Pierre Creton returned to his rural Normandy roots. There, he has continued to make films alongside his neighbours in the agricultural environment to which he remains intimately tied. His philosophy of film‐ making is summarised in the title of a 2010 book, Cultiver, habiter, filmer – inhabit, cultivate, film. Contrary to more traditional notions of framing, distance and objectivity, here lens‐based media is recognised as an apparatus that takes us into an aleatory, reciprocating process of inhabiting, nurturing and being nourished by a place – its geology, architectures, rhythms and populations, human and nonhuman. The ethics of encounter, ecology and openness is intimately embroiled in Creton’s growing, beekeeping and animal husbandry, as well as his art making. This photo‐essay and accompanying text investigates Creton’s maker‐philosophy in the context of the Orcadian island of North Ronaldsay, famous for its seaweed‐eating sheep, kept at the littoral edges by the island’s stone dykes – themselves a high‐maintenance apparatus. Led by Creton's ideas, through observation and habitation‐with, these sheep become for the artist‐writer more than subjects for the camera; they become guides as to how to inhabit and cultivate the watery margins of the archipelago. They become exemplary artists in their own right.