For multimedia artist, Chris Dooks, the world is a small place. Not out of choice, he has had to learn to find the infinite in the finite, a universe in a grain of sand.
Since being struck down over 10 years ago with the debilitating illness, ME (colloquially known as chronic fatigue), he has endured long bouts of crippling disability, sometimes being so weak he has not even been able to dress himself.
Once a high-flying television director, working on the likes of the Southbank Show and America’s PBS, he had to abandon his career and find a way to express his creativity from within the boundaries of his condition. His art, which primarily belongs to the audio-visual family, has allowed him to do just that.
In many ways, Chris is an unlikely artist to be leading the charge in a forthcoming festival about Scotland’s great outdoors. Running at Woodend Barn across this weekend, the Atomic Doric festival takes a look at Scotland’s landscape and its connections to the wider world through the eyes of some of the UK’s leading artists and the people who live and work within these spaces.
While Chris is limited physically, by slightly changing our perception to appreciate the world from his point of view, it becomes immediately apparent why he is the ideal person to bring Atomic Doric to life.
Aside from being the main creative mind behind the festival as a whole, Chris has created six short films for Atomic Doric. Shot in the festival’s four main locations throughout the summer, Mar Lodge Estate, Glen Tanar Estate, Muir of Dinnet Nature Reserve, and St Cyrus Nature Reserve, his films explore specific sites of interest, or “Tiny Geographies” as he has called them.
In each location, he shows that looking very closely at your immediate surroundings, and engaging with its local inhabitants, is a doorway to the universe at large.
For example, his pilot video of the project, Gardening as Astronomy, has been inspired by the current hypothesis that the sun’s energy is released in 13 year cycles, something which astronomers are just now coming to realise, but which gardeners have known for years. The idea is that, by focusing on the flowers beneath our feet, we can come to understand the stars above.
“It’s all about the fact that you don’t need to go to Chile to the top of a mountain to use a powerful telescope. If society leaves you because of your illness, you can bypass society, and use small art projects to engage with the universe,” Chris said.
“And this is a good example of what I do with my work. It’s about finding ways in which, even if you have lack of mobility, or lack of accessibility, you don’t have to go very far. That’s my entire philosophy.”
On a positive slant, Chris believes that he is a far better disabled artist than he ever was an able-bodied TV director. All it has taken is a change of perception for him to release his full creative potential.
“All of my works are about exhaustion,” he said. “And having ME in many ways is a useful thing to have in the work I do. Because the work I do is about looking at things in my immediate environment and trying to find different ways to make the same 10 sq m or four small walls different everyday.”
His Tiny Geographies sextet of films will launch the Atomic Doric festival tomorrow night in a screening and performance which will also feature music by contemporary folk musician Drew Wright, who performs as Wounded Knee.
Across the weekend, the works of their fellow artists which similarly explore our relationships with the Scottish landscape and its people will come into play.
Artists such as musicians Paul Anderson and Aidan O’Rourke, and choreographer Hayley Durward, have been specially commissioned by Woodend Barn to create original pieces for the weekend.
All artists are united in their desire to help us look at our environments differently, Chris explained. And consequently to remove any sense of daunting vastness we may attach to it.
“All the projects are accessible without being diluted in any way, which is quite rare,” he said.
“When Scotland promotes itself as a place of tourism, especially for outdoor pursuits, it rarely promotes itself in a very accessible way. Also, accessibility seems to be either a box-ticking phenomena, or comes across as a burden.
“What I’ve done is try to raise the power of accessibility. And each of the projects reflect methodologies where anyone could do aspects of them.”
The Atomic Doric multi-arts festival runs at Woodend Barn, Banchory from Friday 29 to Sunday 1 December. Tickets for, and information on, the various events, contact the box office on 01330 825431 or visit www.woodendbarn.co.uk. To view Chris Dooks’s Tiny Geographies series of short films online, visit www.tinygeographi.es