Jennet Thomas
Not Yet Out of the Wood, 2020.
Video 4:23.

Not Yet Out of the Wood is a short film by Jennet Thomas featuring a fractured narrative voiced by anthropomorphic bats who inhabit a dream-like stage-set of trees, moss and twigs. Thomas’s film highlights our irrational fears about bats, which has been especially evident during the Covid-19 crisis, and draws attention to the greater threat that we pose towards them as a species. The film is an off-beat paean to these creatures that culminates in a re-worked David Bowie song.

“ Holed up in London during lockdown, my work for Televistas involves being inside a wood – a deep pocket of nature that has been protected, an asylum of sorts. Forest bathing. I wanted to be on the inside, looking out. But the woods are also a dangerous place to the people of ‘civilization’… Not yet out of the woods is a phrase that we are going to keep on hearing during our long entanglement with the pandemic.

Reading about the ecology of the New Forest, I learned that 13 of the UK’s 18 beleaguered bat species have asylum there. Bats are totemic creatures onto which we project strangeness, even menace.

That potent image has now become super-charged by the origin story of Covid-19. Along with the rest of the natural world bat habitats are being destroyed at a terrifying rate. But they’ve been around for 50 million years. They don’t want anything to do with us, and this whole thing is not their fault.

I needed to keep myself sane during lockdown and there is no better way for me to do this than to work with papier-maché.
I made a horseshoe bat’s-head mask, 
I made a skeleton. 

I made a miniature landscape-vista by collecting twigs and moss from the local cemetery, scraping it off the gravestones. 
I put it on a rotating platform designed for retail commodity display. 
I rigged up a very basic blue-screen set-up in my room.

I started listening to a fair bit of David Bowie. 
I wanted to do something playful and foolishly anthropomorphic.
I wanted the bats to have a right of reply.”

 

Jennet Thomas is based in London, UK. She makes films, performances and installations exploring connections between the everyday, fantasy and ideology. Her work can look like experimental film, children’s drama, or performance art – it’s a call for complexity that collides genres, experimenting with collective constructions of meaning.

Her work has been shown internationally, including two solo shows at Matt’s Gallery, London; at the IFF Rotterdam, European Media Arts Festival, New York Underground Film Festival, and museums including Tate Britain and MOMA New York. Since 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include Animal Condensed>>
Animal Expanded#2, Peninsula Arts, Plymouth (2018); Unspeakable Freedom, Tastes Like Chicken, Block 336, London, (2016); The Unspeakable Freedom Device, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Utah (2016); The Unspeakable Freedom Device, Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, 2015 which then toured to Matt’s Gallery, London, Grand Union, Birmingham, Primary, Nottingham, Outpost Norwich, Cube, Bristol. School Of Change, Matt’s Gallery, London (2012); School Of Change - the recruitment – live multi media performance with dance troupe including composer Leo Chadburn at Camden Arts Centre, London (2011); All Suffering Soon To End, Matt’s Gallery, London (2010) (written summer 2020).

Not Yet Out of the Wood was commissioned by More Than Ponies with support from Arts Council England. With thanks to Paul Tarragó for bat performance and lighting.