Laura Molton

To film gestures, places. To sense that something is afoot, covertly.
To not know. To investigate.
To learn by doing and therefore to attempt to break through the depths of reality.
This could describe the thread that Laura Molton weaves into her films, in which every sense is stimulated to tell the story of an encounter, of a place, like an eco-poetic quest.
Her filmic work is both an art of common words, a eulogy of reality and a plural, troubled and intense space that looks to delve under images and imaginations.
Without seeking confrontation, in soft touches and fragments, her gaze wanders across the surfaces and depths that conceal a buried past. Her perception does not require any manifesto to reveal invisible pollutions. Nothing overbearing — just a ground-level vision that anchors the narrative.
A sense of danger lingers. It can be felt in the body, hands, tips of the fingers, skin, water, soil, mud, rain, moss… In the sound, in the invisible, off-screen.
What matters to Laura is to be with, neither ahead nor behind, but to be one with the film in order to share the moment of discovery and located knowledge.
At the intersection of storytelling, contemplation and memory, Laura Molton’s films reendow reality with a sense of reconciliation with bygone times. They harmonise us with the sensible world and give us power to act within it.

We need stories of justice that enlarge our thinking, stories of relationships to place that enlarge our thinking.٭

Martine Michard, October 2023

٭*Deborah Bird Rose, in The Ecological Humanities in Action, Wildproject 2019.

Translated by Lucy Pons, 2024