Penarth-based artist Georgina Biggs will be sharing her immersive film based on a year's residency on Flat Holm island at Penarth Pier's own Snowcat cinema, with free screenings over the weekend of Saturday April 15th and Sunday 16th.

 No Place Like (Flat) Holm was created by SheWolf, Georgina's disability led company https://www.shewolfspirit.com and originally shown at Wales Millennium Centre in October as part of Llais (Festival of Voice).

The 25 minute film will be shown on the hour and half hour for free between 9.30am and 3pm on Saturday and Sunday and then used as part of a schools programme about the island on Monday 17th organised in partnership with Cardiff Harbour Authority.

The story of the film is told through the body and voice of a lone woman in chronic pain, isolated on Flat Holm across a year's residency there – observing the cycles of life and death on the island as the gulls which dominate the island come and go. The film is an intimate duet between broken body and damaged earth – the search for home/holm in Flat Holm's brutal yet beautiful embrace.

Georgina Biggs.

Georgina explained the screenings at Snowcat are a kind of homecoming for the project.

Her relationship with Flat Holm began while walking on the beach in Penarth during the first covid lockdowns.

She told us : "I had not long moved to Wales from England when the pandemic hit. Living in a flat in Penarth, I was in unchartered territory. But I was lucky, instead of being stuck in the deepest darkest recesses of an industrialised West Midlands, I had now acquired a personal stretch beach for that time.

"I took myself to the shorelines of Penarth and, looking towards the great chasm of industry across the bay and towards Flat Holm on the horizon, I began working with the landscape. I was drawn to the island's history as an isolation unit (cholera hospital) where sailors from around the world were dropped off to avoid bringing such an infectious disease into the busy port of Cardiff. The sailors were left to recover or die, stranded on a rocky outcrop within site of the Glamorgan shores which they would never reach, I wanted to explore the parallels between this and our contemporary experiences of isolation."

Lying just 6km off Lavernock Point in the Bristol Channel, Flat Holm is a microcosm of Wales' history. Its shorelines are studded with secret caves, and its landscape hides stories of survival against all the odds. The buildings, remnants of military defenses and a former cholera isolation hospital, echo stories of loss, isolation and grief; a nation defending itself against invasion. Now operating as a tourist attraction, bird sanctuary and Site of Special Scientific Interest it defends itself against the threat of climate change.

Living off-grid through all seasons on the island, Georgina and the SheWolf team worked on Flat Holm throughout 2022, supported by Cardiff Harbour Authority who own and manage Flat Holm. The island is both beautiful and brutal. It changes dramatically through the seasons and life there is largely dictated by the nesting and breeding of the gull colonies which take over island life from spring and into summer – leaving each Autumn to migrate as far as the coasts of Spain and Portugal and even to The Gambia in Africa.

Working on the island meant working with the gulls, walking through their colonies and feeling the tension between their life on the island and their foraging flights to rubbish tips and landfill sites on the mainland, often returning with plastic and glass which they then cough up as pellets on the island's rocky shoreline.

Georgina, SheWolf's Founder and Artistic Director, explained : "A combination of a chance meeting with Tim Orrell of Cardiff Harbour Authority who manages a National Heritage Lottery project on Flat Holm and my research led me to work on Flat Holm itself at the height of lockdown. The work resulted in a film that through movement, sound and song, amplified my unheard/unseen narrative of pain. Artistically it began to draw parallels between what I saw as the damage done to both body and earth as a result of fast pasted modern living - a world that demands constant acceleration."

The film's soundtrack has been co-composed by Gina with Welsh traditional musician Oliver Wilson-Dickson (http://www.fiddle.org.uk) who visited the island on the first residency and whose close links to Wales' culture and songs have helped Gina embed practice in the island's landscape. Songs, both drawn from the traditional music canon and devised from immersive work in landscape, are key to her practice, and working with Oliver offered a vital connection to the island's places and people through the centuries.

No Place Like (Flat) Holm was supported through the Lottery by Arts Council Wales .