HEAVEN /George Storm Fletcher by Kerry Harker
film still, HEAVEN /George Storm Fletcher, 2024
The heady scent of lilies fills the air one evening in late May as we cram into a makeshift screening room at Hyde Park Book Club in the student suburb of Headingley, north of Leeds’ city centre. HPBC is a much-loved hub for community and creativity, and home to the Hyde Park Art Club programme. We’re here for the premiere of George Storm Fletcher’s first publicly commissioned film HEAVEN, part of their solo show curated by Sarah Roberts and Benedetta D’ettorre. It’s a packed house – testament to the popular following the artist has been gathering since their highly successful degree show at the University of Leeds in 2022.
HEAVEN is a road movie of sorts, a journey taken in a rented van from central Leeds north-west along the historic Kirkstall Road, a main artery into the city known for its picturesque Cistercian Abbey painted by Turner, Girtin and Cotman. The inciting incident in the drama that Fletcher crafts here is that time in July 1984 when their Mum, Amanda, then a young woman living with her parents between studies, missed the last bus home after a night out in Leeds, leaving her with no option other than to walk the ten-miles-plus home to Burley in Wharfedale, hitching a lift along the way. ‘Everyone used to walk everywhere then,’ explains Amanda, matter of factly.
But alarm bells ring of course and it’s difficult not to think of Sarah Everard, murdered after being kidnapped while walking home in South London in 2021. Happily, HEAVEN turns out to be a good news story. Amanda was two thirds of the way there before a young man driving a loaded florist’s van finally stopped to pick her up and deliver her safely home. These events, says Fletcher, presented ‘a rare opportunity to tell a story about kindness and safety’.[1] Retracing their Mum’s journey also extends the artist’s practice-based research, contributing to an oral archive of the Kirkstall area and enabling connections to communities living there now through a book that Fletcher is compiling as part of the project.
From the film’s opening scene, our viewpoint is inside the van, observing Amanda who is up front in the passenger seat, and George, seated behind her, as we make our way along Amanda’s route. The tightly cropped camerawork – by Fletcher’s collaborator, filmmaker Ronnie Danaher – moves back and forth between the two as they chat and swap anecdotes, occasionally focusing on some landmark beyond the window, or switching perspective to the road ahead. A second camera on the dash focuses on Amanda’s face as she recalls the places and people of this earlier period in her life.
In her book Feminist City (2019) Leslie Kern asks how we’d build cities differently if we foregrounded alternative perspectives to those traditionally offered by the male-dominated built environment. How radical in look and feel would a city made specifically for mothers and daughters be? For female friends and sisters? For a woman on her own? Fletcher’s film seeks to queer the city too – to foreground gendered personal narratives that touch on Amanda’s evolving sense of self as a young woman, and her relationships with those around her. The passing landscape of the city glimpsed through the van window is not just a series of physical locations, it’s a portal into recollections about her changing hairstyles and dress sense, the music she was listening to (more Visage than Adam Ant), the boozers and discos frequented with friends and work colleagues, and her ‘ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies’ relationship with Fletcher’s grandparents. Plus ça change.
HEAVEN is also, then, a story about the passing of time. The film plays out in the rough equivalent of the real-time journey (45 minutes) and the sequences inside the van are edited to look more-or-less like one take. It forms a reflection on deep-seated changes in the social fabric of one northern city and the nation at large over a forty-year period. A time before Uber and CCTV, not innocent – the story takes place only three years after the capture of Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ and coincides with the Miners’ strike – but in the throes of an unstoppable political revolution. Small details hint at the neoliberalism that was transforming Britain under the Thatcher administration. In typically deadpan style, Amanda reminds George that ‘Branding was the big thing, because it was the 80s – remember?’ The film deftly weaves together these bigger observations with intimate details that add colour to Amanda’s life in 1984. At one point, out of the van and encountering the scent of a red currant hedge near her childhood home, she becomes emotional and confesses, ‘I find smells really triggering’. Earlier we’ve discovered that the perfume in the back of the florist’s van seemed ‘sweet and gorgeous and just heavenly’ to her, something the van driver seemed ‘oblivious to’ in Amanda’s eyes. There’s plenty of humour too – a funny anecdote about being turned off punk by the spitting at a Leeds Town Hall gig by The Damned and onto the frilly-shirted New Romantics instead – and a lovely warmth in the relationship between mother and daughter that keeps us more than engaged.
Fletcher’s film, in part, asks important questions about our relationships with ageing and with events in the past that we can no longer change or undo. Do we look back through rose-tinted spectacles? What do we bring into the present with us and who do we leave behind?
Some road movies end in disaster, but there’s no off-the-cliff Thelma and Louise denouement here. A late segment filmed in the interiors of the Wetherby Whaler fish and chip restaurant, where Amanda worked back in its heyday as the world-famous Harry Ramsden’s, stretches the running time a little and could have been edited with no detriment to what has come before. In the final scenes, we see Amanda and George sitting together in the back of the van, surrounded by vividly coloured blooms shown in lingering close-up while we imagine their potent scent. Then they’re back on the road again, both up front in the van now with George driving. Off on another adventure.
In Fletcher’s hands, a deceptively simple anecdote about a young woman’s night out several decades ago becomes the perfect vehicle for a complex, absorbing and frequently witty observation on the relationships between individual and familial histories, and the vast political landscape against which our small personal psychodramas play out. Just as the florist’s van represents a space safe from the major socio-political shift ongoing in the 80s, of the kind we sometimes feel unable to effect or resist, Hyde Park Book Club felt like the perfect safe space in which to experience this film – the sort of space every community needs for shelter from the storm outside.
The film is presented here at HPBC alongside an enlarged film still and one of the Artist’s signature hand-painted typographic banners. This one reads MY LUCK WAS ABOUT TO CHANGE, a line Amanda delivers as the journey reaches the point where the florist picked her up. Fletcher has said that, for them, art is ‘a constellation of ideas, histories and politics’.2 HEAVEN certainly aligns with that understanding, conjuring a compelling narrative across generations. Leaving behind the lilies, props left over from filming, I head out into the warm, wet evening to make my own way home.
film still, HEAVEN /George Storm Fletcher, 2024
[1] Quoted in HEAVEN exhibition publication, Hyde Park Art Club, 2024.