Salthouse

SALTHOUSE takes place in two distinct but connected settings. The first is an abandoned Salthouse at Prestwick beach on the west coast of Scotland: semi-rural, post-industrial, intertwined with the natural world yet apart from it. The second is in the corridors of the McLellan Galleries in the nearby city of Glasgow – a place once culturally alive and physically salubrious, now abandoned, dilapidated, fungus growing from its walls. The two places are haunted by the film’s sole protagonist, a woman costumed in natural shells and drift wood, black lace, antique lampshades, and drawings printed on her skirt. This woman – or, perhaps, creature –  haunts the spaces of the film, collecting sea water in a pot  one segment, carrying that pot through the gallery corridors in the next .The defunct and decrepit interiors, the decayed confusion of nature and artifice, human and inhuman, reflect the failures of modernism but also the continuing nostalgic appeal that ‘lost future’ holds.