FOSSIL is a 16mm film installation shot over three years in the Royal Academy Schools studios and a large-scale, handmade artists’ book that takes the form of a bilder atlas album, or scrapbook. The film explores the RA’s extraordinary collection of historic architectural casts, copies of antique columns, capitals and friezes, previously hidden behind temporary studio walls for 50 years. The film combines intense close-ups of the casts - optically printed as negative sequences and tinted with colour filters when projected - with verité style footage that records the precarious revealing of the casts and their ungainly demounting.

FOSSIL was commissioned for the Royal Academy of Arts Schools Weston Studio Gallery by Eliza Bonham Carter, Curator and Head of RA Schools and organised by Joanna Thomas, Exhibitions Coordinator. Funded by the RA, the elephant trust, Goldsmiths Department of Art and Central St Martins, FOSSIL was a long term project that resulted in a 16mm film shown from an adapted 16mm projector and a curated show of objects relating to the film: six Eighteenth century architectural plaster casts from the RA collection; a large scale watercolour copy of a painting commissioned by John Soane for a lecture at the RA in 1804; and a set of photographs of Blinky Palermo painting the frieze for an exhibition at Edinburgh School of Art, curated by Richard DeMarco in 1970 [courtesy the DeMarco archive, Edinburgh].

A second exhibition at the British School at Rome saw the project expand to include a large scale handmade scrapbook of 800 images, researched and photographed at the BSR library, The Royal Academy Library, The Architectural Association Library, the British Library, and Sir John Soane’s Museum.

The film and curated exhibition were staged at the Royal Academy during September and October 2019, and the scrapbook was exhibited at the British School at Rome Sainsbury Gallery in January 2024, the book having been researched and photographed over a number of visits to the BSR collection and archive in 2022 and 2023.

The film has also been screened at:

Image Forum Tokyo, November 2022 [Touched. Gripped. Held. Recent 16mm films by Graham Ellard & Stephen Johnstone].

The Kaleide Theatre, RMIT University, Melbourne, organised by the Artists Film Workshop, Melbourne, April 2024 [Slowly, and by hand— a programme of films by Graham Ellard & Stephen Johnstone].

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38410