Song of the Fig and Apple, 2020
Anna Fairchild BA (Hons) MA DFA
Song of the Fig and Apple, 2020
The film takes its reference, in part, from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience; Holy Thursday, published in 1789.
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are filled with thorns:
William Blake moved from London to Felpham on Thursday 18th September 1800. On arrival he mentions the wind, trees, birds and the air in a letter to his patron Thomas Butts. The experience of the abundant garden and landscape around Felpham, with a vision of God on the beach at Bognor Regis had a life changing effect on Blake.
Apple and fig trees often appear symbolically in biblical and other religious texts; the apple falling from the tree and eaten by Adam and Eve; the fig being possibly the oldest cultivated fruit in the world and a symbol of prosperity. The first stanza in Blake’s Holy Thursday alludes to the extreme child poverty Blake had witnessed in London before moving to Felpham.
Song of the Fig and Apple uses film shot from a rudimentary garden swing attached to the branches of an apple tree, interplayed with the ever so slight movement of branches viewed from underneath of a nearby fig tree.
These extracts of film with ambient sound are intended to resonate with a kind of slowed down dreamy state of wandering imagination where the images move from the swinging motion to stillness under the apple tree and to another time and through this almost meditation on plants and birdsong, drift off to memories of childhood summer days looking for wild fruit and flowers in the Somerset and Hertfordshire countryside.
Anna Fairchild, August 2020
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