Metalpleater
Charlotte Prodger
February 2008 - May 2009
Her hands were positioned stiffly, about ten inches apart. The fingers furled, grasping space. Between them he could see that she was holding an imaginary object, the object in the photograph. Her eyes narrowed. He stared. First at her, then at the space through which her gaze was locked. He needed to shift his chair in order to share her view. She remained motionless, locked with outstretched arms. Between the hands, tightly framed, lay the mountainside. The first swelling rise, and to its right the sharp drop into deep ravine. Then up again, over the soft fold of the next peak. Drop down to the next ravine. Peak. Ravine. Hand.
Metalpleater is a 16mm film made by Charlotte Prodger in collaboration with silversmith Maya Selway. Metalpleater tells a fragment of a story that weaves the complexities of bloodlines and timelessness into the creation of a mythical hybrid tool used by an artist to pleat mountains. Inspired by the Perast mountains in Montenegro, Charlotte wrote the story of the Metalpleater which describes a chance encounter between a man and a woman - the woman, an artist, casually claims that she made a tool to construct the landscape before them.
The film describes the process of making that tool, with silversmith Maya Selway crafting a pleating tool from silver, a tool for looking through, a tool to pleat mountains. Its crafting echoes the medieval processes used to make mirrors from highly polished silver surfaces.
The film presents a fraction of the story and invites the viewer to complete the object and its application. Other aspects of the work include a poster advertising the ‘woman who pleats mountains’, a legend written in contemporary language, and a series of improvised musical recordings made in collaboration with a ten piece female collective that weave Charlottes and Maya’s conversations together and capture the realisation of the Metalpleater.
The project was made in collaboration with Maya Selway and musical collective Muscles of Joy.