Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, wherever you are in the world. I am Robert Diamant and you're listening to Talk Art. Welcome to Talk Art. Now today I am meditating on a thought which is one of art being activism and I've been thinking a lot lately about the power of film in particular and how often we think of film as entertainment or you know like
Hollywood or going to the cinema, all that kind of stuff. But I actually connect with film. Well, I have been connecting with film over the last few years in a kind of different way. Like obviously I've just interviewed Sir Isaac Julian and I was thinking about exhibition making and creating film as activism in terms of an art context.
But there's a film that I saw a few years ago, which was produced and directed by today's guest, Nothing Compares, which was the biography of Sinead O'Connor, who was such an incredible artist. And it was actually the film that made me realize her artistry beyond just the music and really how music works.
was a means to her to tell her story and to kind of highlight the plight of others through an artistic platform. But I feel like she could have actually been a painter or she could have been a writer or, you know, it didn't really matter necessarily the medium that she chose. It was really about what she had to say.
And I feel like that about today's guest, because I feel like she has been making a such fascinating films and each time they're very, very different. So I was initially introduced to her work through the amazing mutual friend we have called Emma Reeves.
Emma has worked in the photography world for a long time and was also at Rolling Stone and was actually part of that incredible Collier Shore shoot with Kristen Stewart that we talked about at depth recently in Collier's episode on this same season. So if you're listening to this now, go and check that out too. Emma's an extraordinary person who sort of brings people together.
And when I was moving to Margate, she told me about today's guest's film, Taking the Water, which was just the most amazing, again, documentary about women and a community of people who were using natural swimming, kind of swimming in open water in the sea as a kind of healing space.
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Chapter 2: How did Kathryn Ferguson's background influence her filmmaking?
You know, that's obviously a very different topic to Sinead O'Connor. But what I think is so interesting is even in Nostalgie, the recent short film that she made and got nominated for a BAFTA and then won the IFTA, a second IFTA prize, actually. So well done.
there's a mission at the core of this, which is kind of highlighting women's voices, highlighting her own perspective as a director, but also talking about things that matter to humanity and trying to find the humanity and trying to wake up the humanity in the viewer. And I think it's a really important art form. And that's why I wanted to dedicate an episode to today's guest.
So I would like to welcome to Talk Art, Catherine Ferguson. Hi, Catherine.
Hi, Rob. So nice to be here. Thank you for a beautiful intro.
Thanks for welcoming me into your studio. Lovely to have you in here. It's nice to have someone in here with me. It's great. And you have an amazing view of like a green park, which I'm loving. I do. No, it's a fab spot in Margate.
We're very lucky. It's great. So how did you end up in Margate? Well, I moved to Margate 10 years ago. I moved, I'd say it was the week after Brexit. My partner and I had been planning to move for five months prior and were very excited, disbelieving that Brexit could possibly happen.
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Chapter 3: What themes does Kathryn explore in her documentary work?
And literally the week that we were set to move down here, it did happen. And we were suddenly excited.
fish out of water we've been in london for 16 years and wanted to try somewhere new and had various friends that had moved and had sold us the stories of the power of the sea swimming and the turner gallery and i guess this like thriving artistic community that was starting to form here way back in 2016 and even before that we were considered the second wave
When we arrived, there'd been an earlier one of people arriving from London. And yeah, we got here and we're so thrilled to be here. But as I said, Brexit happened just before we arrived. So there was just this real rub of like arriving into this exciting new moment in our lives and excitement about what this community could be. But then this massive change.
realization and rub of what was happening politically around us. So to counter that, other than rant about it to lots of friends, was I began swimming in the sea. I went to Walpole Bay Tidal Pool and I started swimming every day in the water. I wanted to be in the sea and in the water.
And what I found in the water was this incredible community of humans who were the polar opposites of the xenophobia and I guess, just general racism that was happening on dry land. The sea provided this gorgeous soup, this friendly soup. And as I was swimming and finding my own feet in this new town, I just met all of these beautiful people who felt the same as I did.
And I wanted to make a film about them. That came pretty fast. I think within a matter of weeks of moving, I thought, I need to document this. This is magic. And that's where Taking the Waters came from.
Now, it's really interesting because making films is obviously a very difficult thing.
You have to like fundraise, you have to get permissions, you have to do a lot of research, you have to even get the permission to interview certain people if you're making a documentary, say, or if you're making a film, which is what you're doing more of now, you have to cast people and, you know, get their agents to approve it.
But what I think I've always noticed with you is that your projects are always very like, most of the time, passion driven. And they're kind of projects that you feel very urgently like you have something to say.
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Chapter 4: How did 'Nothing Compares' evolve during its production?
Is that something that you kind of developed in time? Because I know originally you studied at the RCA, for example, when you were in London before. So where did this kind of interest in telling your own kind of passionate stories come from?
Well, I studied fashion originally. I went to Central Saint Martins and I did the fashion communication and promotion course many moons ago, but it was actually there that I got extremely into film. I wasn't studying it. I didn't know how to do it, but I was very inspired by what Nick Knight was doing at Show Studio and this idea of merging the fashion image with motion.
And it was really from that point on, way back in 2005, that I started to experiment with film and I worked in, I'd say, fashion film for a good five to ten years, potentially. I worked with lots of brands and designers making shows for online and for opening catwalks, etc.
But what I found quite quickly, I guess, within this world of working in fashion was the passivity of the models that I was shooting and the stories or the lack of stories, maybe. that I was trying to share with my moving image-based work.
And it was through that process, well, maybe it was only a couple of years actually, post-graduation, that I decided I was going to go back and do a master's and I really wanted to focus more on film. So as you said, I went to the Royal College of Art And it was whilst I was there, I really started to think about the potency of film.
I also thought about the potency of the fashion image and how you can create such an engaging, immediate image that draws people in. I was excited about the immediacy of the image itself.
and then once you can i kind of thought with film if i can get them in with how it looks and then pack a punch with what i'm trying to say when i've got them there that feels like an interesting way to be able to start making films so basically on the back of that i made my first i guess instead of it being a commission film or a fashion film i made a film called mathr which is gaelic for mother and it was a film about my own mother and it was my graduation piece um at the rca and
It was looking at themes of Mother Ireland, Irish women under Catholicism and the state. And I guess I was really starting to look at the country where I was from through the lens of my own mother. It was still very experimental. It was very visual. I had shot a documentary element, but I ran out of time and decided to make a very visually driven experimental piece.
But what was quite unbelievable about that whole situation is I was in the midst of this film and I knew that I needed the right score for this film. And there's nobody I could think of as music who I wanted more than Sinead's.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Kathryn face while making 'Nothing Compares'?
That was where it really began, was starting, you know, actually having the space and being at somewhere like the RCA, where I was very much encouraged to explore. I realized that so much that I wanted to explore was about the country I'd come from.
Yeah, it's interesting. So you grew up in Belfast in Northern Ireland, and you were growing up at a time where there was a lot of re-evaluation in terms of when you were growing up on how women had been treated, on how religion had played such an impact in oppressing women and different groups of people.
And it was an interesting parallel in a way with your own experience and that of Sinead O'Connor. Yeah. Was that something that you think growing up at that time helped to form some sort of resilience or strength within you or rage? Because I always feel like you're a very driven person, but very precise. It's not like you're just screaming with anger.
It's like you actually have really had time to kind of grow into something quite thoughtful.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think we all grew up confused in Ireland in the 80s and 90s. Obviously, I grew up in the north and that came with its own situation. But certainly across the island of Ireland, we'd grown up, I'd say, as second class citizens, as women, with obviously the church dominating everything in the south.
And women's autonomy being so far down the list, it was something that we kind of grew up with. And of course, I had an inherent anger about how we had been treated and how our mothers and grandmothers have been treated. I was introduced to Sinead through my father when I was five.
He adored her and he blasted the lion and the cobra on repeat as we drove around rainy Ireland and many, many a road trip with her just wailing and blasting through the speakers. And it was such a visceral experience for me then as a young girl. And then when I was in my early teens and her second album came out, I guess I was conscious
By then, I also had multiple friends who felt the same as I did and felt the same about her as I did. I was very lucky that my father had showed me her as an example of exactly like this perfect character, like just so bold and brave and talented and cool and angry and all the things that I
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Chapter 6: How does Kathryn view the role of women in the film industry?
It was the fury at witnessing that happen to one of our own. I think maybe that was the start of it for me. And that is, I guess, that's led me on this path, you know, and led me back to her then when I had the bravery to go after her in life. 2018.
2018, you actually ended up making a music video with her.
That was 2012 actually. So what's even more remarkable is the film Mather that I mentioned, the RCA film, I sent it to the manager, the kind manager who let me use the music. And I can't remember if he watched it or even got back at the time.
But what did happen was the following year, I got a message or a call, I can't remember, from him and from John Reynolds, Sinead's producer and long-term best friend, asking if I'd direct Sinead's first music video in 15 years for her song, Fourth and Vine. So it was directly off the film about my mummy that led me to then meeting her the following year.
And what was it like making Forth and Pine? Did you get to actually meet her and hang out with her?
Yeah, I certainly did. Yeah, I got to go to her amazing house. I got to see her seven foot Virgin Mary in her hallway. I got to go in and yeah, I spent about a week with her. So it was really, I think we ended up shooting out in County Meath in like a little country pub in the middle of nowhere.
And, yeah, I mean, it was just, I just couldn't believe my luck that everything had led me to actually being with her and hanging out with her and meeting the beautiful people around her who ended up being my very close collaborators on Nothing Compares.
Wow. So when you, in 2018, started this journey of making Nothing Compares, it must have been quite important for you, obviously, to A, get her approval, and maybe her involvement on some level. But also, were you aware at the time of how big it was in terms of a wider political topic?
Because I feel like it's gone on to have so many reverberations around the world, because it's so applicable to other causes. And I don't just mean in terms of solidarity, but I mean in terms of like women across the world and how women are treated in different countries. I feel like it was such a big topic that by looking at that one example, did you kind of understand its power in that way yet?
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of art as activism in Kathryn's work?
I guess that's how we managed to get Sinead's blessing in the first place, because I certainly know the team around her felt that her voice
there's a huge omission of Sinead's voice from all of this incredible activity that was happening and particularly in Ireland I think that's why it was encouraged to happen from talking to John about it he'd been approached I think a couple of times every year for 30 years at that point about doing a film but there was something about the timing of us getting in touch with him at that moment and I guess because he'd
worked with me before and I was an Irish woman and I had a lot of the same rage and fury about injustice as Sinéad herself that he felt this could be a good option. But of course, when we began, it was my first feature documentary. We had no funding, we had no backers. We just had a lot of passion and belief that this needed to happen and it needed to happen soon.
So that really set us off on our way. It took, goodness, I think it took three years to fund fully, then with a final year in the edit. And then during that, COVID happened. I had my first baby. Everything just kind of seemed to collide at the same time. It was hard to make nothing compares. It felt like in some ways,
every door flung open eventually everyone wanted to see this happen but it felt like there were these big kind of like sticky obstacles not having a baby but certainly covid there were just things that kept happening and continued to happen that made it difficult but i think it was our own tenacity and my friends say i'm like a stubborn mountain goat i don't uh i don't
to walk away from things easily. I was determined that we were going to make this and get it out there. And amazingly, we did. And it's launched in January 2022 at Sundance.
But I actually felt when I first met you at that time, I mean, and I saw the film, I remember saying to you like how I couldn't believe how many years it had taken to make. But then when I watched it for a second time, I suddenly realized how actually that time had obviously been so valuable because you could have probably made that much quicker.
I don't know if you'd had a big budget, you could have like paid to hire all of those images and all the footage and everything. But it wouldn't have been what it is because the reason it's so good is it's like a tapestry, like almost like this epic collage. And I feel like the time you had meant the research into it was so detailed and so passionate and heartfelt.
And I really felt like everything you included was there deliberately. How important was that to like have that kind of intense research in terms of like finding all of the visuals you ended up, you know, layering into it?
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Chapter 8: What future projects is Kathryn Ferguson working on?
Is our view on this correct? And it was just brilliant because everyone we met was just like, absolutely, it's right. And it's unbelievable that it hasn't been told or shown and this hasn't existed before now. And what was really interesting, actually speaking to historians in Dublin, they were saying back in 2018, for the first time ever, she was being written into the history books.
And it wasn't just as, oh, here's a fabulous musician who's done very well. She was being written in as a really important cultural Irish figure for what she'd done. But that was new and that was 2018. So it had taken that many decades for even her own to be including her in the way that she's now being seen.
I think for me, the film Nothing Compares is such a great distillation of why being an artist matters and why we need artists in a society and how we have to nurture them and take care of them and obviously allow them to rebel because they obviously need to rebel in order to exist, I guess. But there's something so perfect about this portrait of an artist.
And that's why I really wanted to have this conversation on Talk Art because I feel like for anyone that hasn't seen Nothing Compares, You have to see it because it's not a music documentary. It's about an artist. And I really, really believe that. Was that something that mattered to you, like in the making of it?
Absolutely. And I think what you said at the start there was really on point that, you know, of course, music was her vessel and that's how she communicated. But Sinead was an artist in every sense. She lived and breathed her art. And it came before anything else. It came before commercial success. It came before fame.
Everything that she did was trying to communicate through her work and trying to communicate messages, political messages. Her point of view, she really wanted to connect with people and communicate to them. And it was through this incredible voice that she was able to. But I'm nearly certain if she hadn't have sang, she would have been a writer or, as you said, a painter.
You know, it was inherent in her to get this out no matter what.
I was also really sort of in love of how she would reference Irish culture. I met her once years and years ago when she was making a record with Dave Stewart from Eurythmics. I loved that record. She did a song called Jealous, which is still to this day one of my favourite records of all time. Yeah.
So for the album cover of Faith and Courage at that time, she worked with Jim Fitzpatrick, who was a really great Irish artist. He'd done a lot of album covers and things before. I think he worked with people like Thin Lizzy and there were many different people that he made artwork for. But that portrait of her was so beautiful.
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