Commons - David Blandy
The Amelia Scott, Mount Pleasant Road, Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN1 1AW
Exhibition open from 26 September – 11 January 2025
Private view: Thursday 25 September, 6-8:30pm
Commons is an expansive and thought-provoking new film by artist David Blandy, co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and The Amelia Scott as part of the programme for The Open Road. Blending archive, local history, nature, and storytelling, Commons invites audiences on a journey through the ancient rocks, woodlands and shared spaces of Tunbridge Wells Commons.
Trailer: Commons, David Blandy, 2025; A Film & Video Umbrella and The Amelia Scott Commission; with thanks to Screen Archive South East & Voiceover artist: Mike Bracken
Drawing on the collections of objects and specimens at The Amelia Scott, Tunbridge Wells, and The Beaney, Canterbury, Commons combines archive film from Screen Archive South East, 3D scans, and newly captured footage of ancient rocks and woodland - common land preserved for all. This expansive work reveals a series of stories told by multiple voices. Like the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, non-human subjects and objects recount their experiences across years or millennia, deliberately decentring the human perspective. Inspired by the natural world and ideas of resistance, these characters embark on a pilgrimage through deep time, each speaking from their own subjectivity.
The work weaves together Amelia Scott’s activism, local filmmaker Frank P. Barnitt’s 1930s nature observations, a 135-million-year-old fossilised bone, a fox, a crow, a kingfisher, and the dislocated hyper-connectivity of a lost phone, as the object itself speaks about the materials from which it is made. Chaucer’s tale of pilgrimage is reimagined as a matrix of interwoven stories, echoing Donna Haraway’s call for the “modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together.”
Still from Commons, David Blandy, 2025; A Film & Video Umbrella and The Amelia Scott Commission
Commons is an elegy to nature and the spirit of resistance. Every object holds a life, a story. Blandy summons each object’s subjectivity, drawing on Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and the fictive anthropology of Ursula Le Guin. Harman’s philosophy rejects anthropocentrism, proposing that all things, from shadows to clouds to the internet, are objects in relation, with no fixed hierarchy.
Focusing on tales of resistance and hope, Commons redefines the museum experience, animating each object by exploring its inner life. The work is a multifaceted examination of history, the collective and the individual, of what it means to share space and share knowledge, and the transience of life in the face of deep time.
Commissioned for The Open Road by The Amelia Scott, Tunbridge Wells, as part of the Kent and Medway Museum Partnership National Portfolio Organisation, and Film and Video Umbrella. Supported by Arts Council England & Screen Archive South East. Music En Ardennes by Frédéric Bonzon, Recording Study Centre for Flemish Music (Centre for the Conservation, Study, Promotion and Valorisation of Flemish Music Heritage), Performed by Balder Dendievel & Tom Hermans, Engineer Sergey Steenackers.
The Open Road is a series of artists moving image works by David Blandy, Amaal Said & Sam Willams, co-commissioned by a partnership of visual arts organisations; Film and Video Umbrella, The Amelia Scott, Cement Fields, FLAMIN, FormaHQ, and Three Rivers.
The Open Road begins in September 2025 with Commons by David Blandy at The Amelia Scott in Tunbridge Wells, continuing with Amaal Said’s Open Country at Red House in October 2025, and then on to The Eel’s Tale by Sam Williams with screenings in North Kent in October 2025 and as a part of Canterbury Festival in November 2025.
The works will be screened together at FormaHQ on the evening of Thursday 13th November 2025. More screenings and events will take place between September and December 2025 and early 2026, hosting the works throughout Bexley, and FormaHQ, London.
Guided Walk: Saturday 4th October / 10:30am
Join a guided walk with artist David Blandy & Research Curator, Dr Ian Beavis. Together you will weave through Tunbridge Wells Common to visit the ancient woodland and striking rock formations featured in the film.
Booking info here
Artist talk: Saturday 22nd November / 2pm
Artist talk with David Blandy in the gallery.
Free, book here