Selected essays and other writing

Artists' Moving Image

Films of Contemplation and Recollection: After Margaret Tait, commissioned for Cinema Despite, accompanying publication for three-day event curated/edited by Marcus Jack, Transit Arts, 2023.

These Passing Instants: the Films of Ute Aurand and Margaret Tait, Portraits: Films by Ute Aurand and Margaret Tait, essay commissioned for touring programme curated by Mutual Films (Aaron Cutler and Mariana Shellard), Brazil, September 2022.

 'The Textures of Memory: Ute Aurand’s Rushing Green with Horses’ in Garbiñe Ortega and María Palacios Cruz (eds), Meditations on the Present: Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl, Jeannette Muñoz and Renate Sami (Pamplona, Spain: Punto de Vista, 2020) 

‘No Longer Peripheral: A day of screenings and talks focused on artist moving image cultures in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland’, The Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), Volume 9, Number 1, 1 April 2020, pp. 110-115(6)

‘Persistence of Vision: Blue Black Permanent and the enduring legacy of Margaret Tait’s life and work', The Bottle Imp, ‘Scottish Island Writing’, July 2019, no 25.

‘Things don’t end: things begin’: Margaret Tait’s life’s work', essay for accompanying booklet for BFI’s DVD/Blu-ray release of Margaret Tait’s Blue Black Permanent (1992)

‘‘The Art of Maximal Ventriloquy: Femininity as Labour in the Films of Rachel Maclean’, co-authored with Sarah Smith, in Lucy Reynolds (ed), Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image: contexts and practices (Bloomsbury, 2019).

‘”To Repeat This Circle”: Margaret Tait at 100’, [report on Tait exhibitions at the Pier Arts Centre, Orkney; Stills Gallery,  Edinburgh; and Peter Todd's home in London], Map Magazine, September 2018.

‘Discoveries in the biscuit tin: the role of archives and collections in the history of artists’ moving image in Scotland’, commissioned for special issue of Moving Image Review and Art Journal, on LUX and 50 Years of British Artists’ Moving Image, Autumn 2017, pp. 132-147. 

‘Local Film Audiences: The Orkney Film Magazine and the The Drift Back (1956)’, Saothair, April 2016, pp. 20-1.

“”Orphans of a GENERATION: Preserving the legacy of Margaret Tait”, MAP Magazine, 2015. 

  “Objects Found: Locating a tradition of Scottish women filmmakers’, Ripples on the Pond, Thinking Collections, Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow, 2015, part of the Glasgow Affiliate project led by Dr Tina Fiske, pp. 43-9.

“Margaret Tait’s ‘Poetry of Presence’”, Introduction for edited collection of poetry by Margaret Tait, Spanish translation, Hen means honey: Poems and Essays by Margaret Tait, Punto de Vista Collection, 2015, Number 9, International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra.

“Archivos de la filmoteca: Margaret Tait y el ‘Poeta en Nueva York’ de Lorca”, Contraluz, magazine article published in English and Spanish, 2015, no. 34, pp. 72-3.

‘My Heart Beat for the Wilderness': Exploring with the Camera in the Work of Isobel Wylie Hutchison, Jenny Gilbertson, Margaret Tait, and other Twentieth-Century Scottish Women Filmmakers' in Anna Stenport and Scott MacKenzie (eds.) Films on Ice (EUP, 2014), pp. 299-309.

‘Demons in the Machine: cinema and modernism in twentieth-century Scotland’, co-authored with Alan Riach',  in Jonny Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman (eds.), Scottish Cinema Now (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), pp. 1-19.

‘”Ploughing a lonely furrow”: Margaret Tait and ‘professional’ filmmaking practices in 1950s Scotland’, in Ian Craven (ed), Movies on Home Ground: Explorations in Amateur Cinema (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009), pp. 301-326, 

‘Stalking the image: Margaret Tait and Intimate Filmmaking Practices’, Screen, 49/2, Summer 2008, pp. 216-221.

Creative/experimental writing

‘Offcuts’, Margaret Tait, Luke Fowler, Sarah Neely, Peter Todd, fieldnotes, issue 5, Summer 2023, pp. 101-115.

‘Me and My Mom’s Camera: Family Archives and Collaborative Memory Work’, in Ingham, Milic, Kantas, Andersdotter, Lowe (eds.), Handbook of Research on the Relationship Between Autobiographical Memory and Photography (IGI, 2023), pp.417-35. 

Dreamfactory, LUNE: a Journal of Literary Misrule, edited by Natalie Sorrell and Sarah Neely, January 2023.  A special issue drawing together creative writing on the theme of cinema memory, developed as part of the Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive project.  With contributions from Louise Welsh, Erdem Rasim Avşar, Ümit Ünal, Catherine Spooner and more. 

‘Reflections and Refractions: Experiments in Sound and Vision’, a response to Jennifer Wicks’ Extended Compositions exhibition, CCA Annex, Glasgow, June 2021

‘The bits of ourselves we leave behind: an essay in fragments’, Map Magazine, December 2016.

'Voicing the Silences' in Lucy Reynolds’ A Feminist Chorus, published by Map Magazine, 2015, edited by Alice Bain and Laura Edbrook

Scottish Cinema

‘”The Skailing of the Picters”: The coming of the talkies in small rural townships in Scotland’, for special issue on British Silent Cinema and the Transition to Sound (ed. Sarah Neely and John Izod), The Journal of British Cinema and Television, 17: 2, April 2020, pp. 254-272.

‘"The story of the reel that went for a swim": cinema memory and the history of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild as narrated through oral history interviews and its surrounding metadata’ in Callum Brown (ed.), 'The Media and Modernity in the Highlands and Islands', special issue of Northern Scotland, 11: 1, May 2020, pp. 42-59,

'From Silent to Sound: Cinema in Scotland in the 1930s’, special issue of Visual Culture in Britain, edited by Sarah Neely and Maria Velez Serna, 2019, 20:3.  With contributions from Bruce Peter, Julia Bohlmann, Sam Gates, John Izod and John Ritchie.

‘”Reel to Rattling Reel”: Telling Stories about Rural Cinemagoing in Scotland’, Participations, 16:1, May 2019, pp. 778-795.

‘Tantalizing fragments: Scotland’s Voice in the Early talkies in Britain and Jenny Gilbertson’s The Rugged Island: A Shetland Lyric (1934)', Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 12:2, Autumn 2018, pp. 171-195.

‘Sisters of Documentary: The influence of Ruby Grierson and Marion Grierson on documentary in the 1930s’, Media Education Journal, Summer 2014.

‘Contemporary Scottish Cinema’, in Neil Blain and David Hutchison (eds.) The Media in Scotland (Edinburgh: EUP, 2008), pp. 151-165.