Tilly Shiner works in film and video from short sketches to long-form collaborative projects and live performance.
Tilly Shiner’s films are expanded portraiture, from simple pleasures to transcendent performances, human and non-human relationships, the bizarre, the overlooked and elevating the ordinary. These film and video works bear witness to both divisive historical moments as well as intimate reflections on life in contemporary Britain. A docu-fiction about the collision of Brexit and the ghost of Beethoven; a grimy portrait of life with teenage boys in the Essex marshes. The undercurrent of these works is a meditation on human-ness; life, death, music, dance, humour, horror, beauty and hope.
Tilly Shiner (b. 1989) lives and works in London, graduated from Central Saint Martins Fine Art in 2012, and has been nominated for the Jarman Award in 2018. Work has been presented in galleries, festivals, public and artist-led spaces.
Blackwater Mouth Tollesbury Creek jumping Ladz
8mm Film / 30:33 min / 2021
A filthy love letter to Essex, like you’ve never seen it before. In a village at the end of the road, teenage boys smothered in black mud, run wild through the vast salt marshes in a bizarre tradition hundreds of years old – ‘creek-jumping’.
Covid has heightened anxiety about cleanliness – it is a social taboo to be dirty. These teenagers throw mud in the face of social norms (literally). In this extraordinary landscape, ritually transformed by the tide, they race through the creek, hurl themselves into the sea and muse on strange local myths – Cannibalism! Shipwrecks! Nuclear power explosions! As the brink of adulthood approaches they struggle to imagine their uncertain futures but they know just how to live in the present – shoes off, mud between the toes, sun burning down, hearts thumping…
Cinematography by Jon Muschamp
Sound recording by Mix House of Noise
Graphic Design by work-form
Music by Gold Panda & Infinite Livez
Second Self, Beethoven Resurrection
4K Video / 01:30:00 / 2020
Second Self, Beethoven Resurrection is a collaborative performance project with Hugo Glendinning with an original score by Sami El-Enany. A magical-realist documentary, a speculative ghost story, an improvised, slow-motion disaster movie.
This magical-realist documentary by film makers Hugo Glendinning and Tilly Shiner, tells the fictional story of Ludvig van Beethoven’s journey to London on the night the United Kingdom left the European Union. Beethoven, or perhaps his spirit, is our witness to Brexit. This however is a distraction from his true mission, LVB is looking for justice. The afterlife visit to London is driven by a desire for compensation – the Royal Philharmonic Society of London commissioned his Symphony no. 9 (Ode to Joy) and originally paid a grossly insulting £50 fee for the rights. Beethoven has stayed angry about this for nearly 200 years. It’s also his 250th Birthday anniversary and he really needs a drink.
Filmed at night on significant political dates (29th March 2019 – first Brexit date, 31st October 2019 – second Brexit date / Halloween, 31st January 2020 – Final Brexit). When the UK voted to leave the EU in 2016, the narrative was overwhelmingly one of division, fear and hate. We wanted to tell a different story. Driven by the urgency of the backdrop of real historical narrative, we introduce our witness, Beethoven to the unravelling of a Nation and the artists who give him hope.
A film by Hugo Glendinning & Tilly Shiner
Cinematography by Billy Trevitt (Ballet Boyz) & Becan Rickard-Elliott
Original score & composition by Sami El-Enany
Sound recording and mix by House of Noise
Produced by KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen, Hugo Glendinning & Tilly Shiner
Production support by Mint & Lime
Beethoven: Jerry Killick
Guardian Angel: George Njoki
Beethoven’s 9th Symphony ‘Ode to Joy’ adapted & performed by Melanie Pappenheim
Beethoven’s 5th Sonata for piano & violin performed by Aisha Orazbayeva
Original dance devised and performed by Flora Wellesley Wesley
What the Fuck am I doing? performed by Martin Creed
Supported by Arts Council England
Hula Thunder-Clap
8mm Film / 08:45 min (loop) / 2016
The film describes a series of loops and potential loops; the female protagonist hoops in a circle around a space, the camera also spins on its axis, the single roll of film loops through the camera and the escalating football chant repeats itself.