This Summer, we are excited to present two films by Hope Pearl Strickland.
Much like the ebb and flow of a waterway, a river holds a perfect memory (2024), overlaps archival footage with newly shot 16mm and LIDAR scans to produce a musical, rhythmic sense of time.
The film meanders gently across waterways in Jamaica, through leisure activities such as rafting on the Martha Brae River and a night-time boat trip in Falmouth’s bioluminescent Lagoon. These dulcet images are intercepted with archival footage that tracks the industrial impact upon the landscape in Northern England. Here we witness water transformed into a resource and a reservoir constructed in Rochdale.
With this work, the artist considers the interrelation of water, memory and labour, playing with techniques of refusal, drift and repetition. For Strickland, rivers ‘…hold within them the poetics of collapsed time and diasporic memory, alongside complex flows of resource and labour extraction’. In this film, water exposes the Industrial Revolution’s and labour migration’s effects on supposedly disparate communities.
Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Touchstones, Rochdale with support from HOME, Manchester.
A further film, Home Soon Come, will launch on 28 July until 12 September 2026.
Biography
Hope Strickland‘s work has screened internationally at film festivals including the 59th New York Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (New Cinema Awards). Presentations in exhibition spaces include Looking Back (Being and Memory) at Arnolfini, Bristol, Bugs and Metamorphosis: Glitching Photography by the Hasselblad Center at Gothenburg Art Museum and the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes at Serpentine Galleries.
Their work has been commissioned by organisations across the UK including FACT, Liverpool, Touchstones Gallery, Rochdale and Film and Video Umbrella. Hope was awarded the Aesthetica Emerging Art Prize in 2023 and was shortlisted for the 2025 Jarman Award.