For his recent performance piece, To the Horizon and Back, artist Alexander Carey-Morgan buried himself beneath 572kg of clay for three consecutive days. Exploring ideas of confinement and release, dissolution and renewal, the artist quite literally lived within his material. “With half a ton of clay, I built a dome around myself, in which I cocooned, nested, lay within.” This is how Carey-Morgan describes the process at the beginning of the collaborative film by photographer and filmmaker Laurence Hills that documents the entire performance, becoming an intimate portrait of an artist pushing himself to his physical and psychological limits.

Soundtracked by an original score from October of October and The Eyes, the sparse, almost spiritual composition mirrors the meditative, liminal state Carey-Morgan put himself within. With nothing but time to think, reflect and endure, he removed himself from light, routine and the outside world. He recalls recurring nightmares before the performance, fearing the clay dome would be too small and entomb him, while during the three days, he experienced visions of ethereal blue lights, and when he finally emerged, he describes feeling physically renewed.

Alongside the real-time documentation of the installation, Hills interweaves surreal cinematography that transforms the clay into a vast, elemental landscape. Carey-Morgan appears to traverse its ridges and scale its peaks, blurring the line between performance and dream.

On the day of the film’s premiere at London’s ICA, Carey-Morgan and Hills sat down for the in-conversation below.

Alexander Carey-Morgan: I finally watched The Godfather for the first time recently – I was amazed. It gave me a feeling that if I had seen this when I was thirteen, it might have inspired me to want to be a director. You are a director. Did you have any moments like that?
Laurence Hills: Yeah, what a film. It’s my dad’s favourite movie, so we’d always watch it a couple of times a year when I was growing up. We would have people come to our house in 1950s costume to watch the whole trilogy. So it’s soaked deep in my veins. But it wasn’t the kind of film that drew me to making films. When my older sister went to art school, she began bringing home films I didn’t know existed. I remember watching Ron Fricke’s Baraka and Samsara for the first time; there’s no dialogue in those movies, but they resonate deeply. I thought those were the kinds of films I wanted to make. 

ACM: There’s something so powerful about stripping back dialogue and letting the cinematography do the talking, how that can capture the rawness and move people. In a sense, it brings it closer to the world of painting and sculpture. Recently you went out to Patagonia on a residency with Paola Sorrentino. How was it creating in such a different environment for you?
LH: Wild and brutal. Filmmaking usually gives you endless opportunities to deliberate over the story and put off getting to work. In Patagonia, I had ten days to arrive somewhere completely unfamiliar, write a film, cast locals from the town, shoot with whoever had the time and energy to help, and then edit it together before screening it to fifty other filmmakers. It was an exercise in making with what is available to you. The greatest lesson is that we need deadlines. If you give yourself ten days to make a film, you make it in ten days. How do you know when you’ve caught a good idea?

ACM: It’s a feeling, it’s in your gut – your intuition is guiding you. The thing about good ideas is they often aren’t singular; they have the ability to expand into many other good ideas. I think the tricky part is turning the idea into a realised and executed piece. It can change a lot in that transition from idea to actualised piece.
LH: We’ve been friends a long time and have been very involved in each other’s work the whole way. We have been on many adventures, each starting with a simple idea: “Take the flight” What does the idea of “take the flight” mean to you?

ACM: We certainly have! And what a time it’s been. Really, the ‘take a flight’ mentality is about making the leap, taking the plunge, rolling the dice, ultimately taking the risk. I think you get what you put out into the world, and if you take the risk of going and doing something different, you’ll get something back in return for it. It also comes with this feeling of adventure, chasing the excitement. Life is this build-up of experiences; the more you have the better perspective you gain. It’s dangerous becoming stagnant in the same existence for too long; you’ve got to shake it up, throw a wild card into the mix.
LH: And having taken the flight and experienced new places and cultures, what is the place that you feel most open to new ideas?

ACM: Nature, for sure – any sort of nature-heavy geographical location. [That’s when] I feel the most connected, most aware and ultimately most inspired. We’re both from rural countryside settings, how do you think that influences your work?
LH: Having the freedom to wander and build things gave me a sense of play. I think my desire to explore is rooted in that. But after twelve years of living in cities, there is a huge urban influence in my life and my work. When I first picked up a camera, I shied away from people; as I’ve grown older, I have fallen in love with people, cities and life in London. I feel that my work now sits somewhere between those two worlds: the freedom and observation of living in the sticks, directed towards human beings and the city. On another note, I found this new quote I love. “Until death, all defeat is psychological,” by Marcus Aurelius. That’s a bar. My work is a career in dealing with rejection, and small defeats can be productive. If they force you to sharpen up and keep moving. Once a film is finished, the setbacks that felt enormous often look trivial. The difficult thing is remembering that while you are still in the middle of them. I greatly admire people who can absorb rejection without allowing it to kill their momentum.

ACM:  I know you have an interest in mythology; what about it do you find so fascinating, and how does it influence your work? Perhaps in building narrative?
LH: I first got hooked on mythology – like a lot of people – through Stephen Fry’s Mythos series. They’re wonderful stories. What fascinates me is how these stories still live so deeply beneath modern culture, in our language, our symbols and our stories. I don’t consciously write myth into my films, but I am drawn to work that has a mythic quality, even when it is set in an ordinary, contemporary world. Before heading to Lisbon to make this piece, your work involved finding or creating organic forms and casting them within heavy plaster. How much did this play a part in forming the idea for From the Horizon and Back?

ACM: That’s a good question; it’s interesting because looking at the sculptures and the performance piece, they definitely share this common thread of containment and then eventually breaking out, or liberation of their outer shell. The sculptures all have this element of excavation, breaking out, a freeing of this inner core. I don’t recall at the time thinking about the sculptures in the making of the piece, but what’s fascinating is that they share this common thread. Like different limbs of the same body, both their own but connected.
LH: In the film you bury yourself in a clay dome for three consecutive days. What was the biggest surprise?

ACM: Waking up in a feminine body in there, with all the physical pain I was enduring having seemingly disappeared. Nothing could have prepared me for the awe of that moment.
LH: That’ll do it.

Follow Alexander Carey-Morgan on Instagram, and Laurence Hills.