Film: Boy Bird Monkey Rose by Margaret Salmon

Margaret Salmon creates intense and beautiful filmic portraits that focus on the minutiae of the everyday. Her close observations of human behaviour, plants and animals are both ethnographic and poetic in nature. She shoots all her work on photo-chemical film, drawing techniques from various cinematic traditions to create her own formal compositions.

boy bird monkey rose brings together a selection of five works, spanning thirteen years of Salmon’s practice: The Enemies of the Rose (2010), a luscious observation of interactions between garden flora and insect life, Gibraltar (2013), which follows the interactions of monkeys and human visitors, Bird (2016), a riff on the instructional nature documentary work of film pioneer Mary Field, Boy (winter) (2022), a series of encounters with contemporary boyhood, and Parolanto (2023), in which children illustrate phrases written in the constructed universal language of Esperanto.

Margaret Salmon’s work has been exhibited widely including at the 9th Yokohama Triennial (2024), the British Art Show 8 (2022-2023) and the Venice Biennale (2007). She won the first Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2006.