United Kingdom
Zillah Bowes
Biography
Zillah Bowes is a Welsh/English filmmaker, photographer and writer. She trained at the National Film and Television School (NFTS), where she was awarded the Kodak Scholarship. Work from her solo photo exhibition Green Dark, funded by the Arts Council of Wales, showed in the RA Summer Exhibition 2020. A preview was shown in Many Voices, One Nation, curated by Ffotogallery and the Welsh Parliament. Her lockdown photo series Allowed won two Honorable Mentions in the International Photo Awards 2020 and was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Visual Art Prize 2021.
Zillah’s film Staying (Aros Mae), funded by Ffilm Cymru Wales/BFI NETWORK and BBC Wales, won the Grand Jury Prize at Premiers Plans Angers Film Festival 2021 and has screened internationally including Palm Springs ShortFest. She won a John Brabourne Award from the Film and TV Charity in 2020 and Creative Wales Award from the Arts Council of Wales in 2017. She has made documentaries and music videos which have shown worldwide and collaborated with Turner prize-winning artist Martin Creed. For her poetry, she has won the Wordsworth Trust Prize, Poems on the Buses Competition and Literature Matters Award from the Royal Society of Literature.
Portfolio
Green Dark
Artist Zillah Bowes explains: "Moonlight allows me to slow down and experience the fragile beat of plant life and the landscape that contains it. Green Dark is an attempt to translate my experiences in and around the Elan Estate near Rhayader, Mid Wales into images. I wish for these photos to be a voice for plant life and amplify its beat since it cannot do so itself, in that it is un-asking. I am guided by the sacred diversity of animal life which is sustained by plant life and in danger of being lost.
"The same landscape contains and sustains a unique and historic community of people, whose open hill farming practices, from tenanted farms, root them through their ancestors with continued belonging. Green Dark offers a space - neither darkness or light - to examine plant and human life, and the transition between them, in the discomfort of an uncertain climate future."
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