A new piece of artist film exploring themes of Storytelling, truth, wellbeing and belonging
The Golden Way is a collaboration between filmmaker Antony Barkworth-Knight, sculptor Paul Dodgson, musician Graham Massey and The Whitworth Art Gallery.
By embracing improvisation and oral histories, the project looks to combine fictional and nonfiction elements to create a powerful story about what it is to belong.
The process of creating the work will involve engaging with individuals to record stories and anecdotes. To help participants focus on the detail of their stories and create a wider discussion a series of animation workshops will take place to help stimulate discussion. The findings from the workshops will be used to construct the narrative, time, place, and authentic details of the work.
Within the final work an intimate sense of place and time will be portrayed through a tapestry of experimental animation, documentary footage, interviews and archive, accompanied by an original score.
Workshops and the production of the film will begin in 2023.
society, sub-cultures and technology undergoing rapid transformation
A framework from which the final narrative will be constructed has been created by Antony Barkworth-Knight and Paul Dodgson
This will follow the journey of experimental animator Nick Meadowcroft as he navigates a life of loss, mystery and creative discovery.
Taking place between 1980 and 2002 (a period often regarded as The Golden Age of British Animation) The Golden Way is set to a backdrop of significant changes to the social fabric of British and European society.
Post-punk, Thatcher’s Britain, squat culture, the emergence of an exciting new contemporary art scene, the collapse of communism, poll tax riots and cool Britannia are all given prominence in the work.
This sense of flux within society creates an atmosphere in which Nick’s personal search for truth becomes increasingly chaotic. Deep down he faces a fundamental conflict as his instinct to retreat within himself butts up against the inescapable reality that he must find a place to belong in an ever changing world.
The film the uses archive to bring to life events of recent history, which coupled with music and sound design, give us a real feeling for what it was like to have been there.
In a life of confusion, surrounded by chaos, animation acts as a sanctuary, a place of calm
Throughout The Golden Way, we see the enigmatic work of animator Nick Meadowcroft. Predominantly abstract, driven by a post-punk DIY ethos, an array of makeshift materials such as crayons, newspaper clipping, sellotape, found objects and chalk, combine to create poetic expressions of life on the margins of society.
Thanks to an unexpected turn of events in the summer of 1980, Nick Meadowcroft, aged 18, is exposed to radical experimental animations. From that moment on his life changes; he feels a constant need to animate.
Gathering equipment and materials in any way he can, reel after reel, (and later cassette after cassette) are created. And as Nick discovers, what appears at first an instinctive pull to produce work later becomes a necessity to keep his life on an even keel.
A deeply personAL journey of creativity, wellbeing and self-discovery
At its heart The Golden Way is a deeply personal story of self-discovery.
It is a story with authenticity at it’s centre, through the media we see and hear, the delivery of the story telling and the questions the work asks about storytelling in a post-truth age.
Production of The Golden Way will begin in 2023.
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