infoLaurie (1978)
Amber Films (Producer)
25 mins, 16mm
Colour/optical
Documentary
I've always had that desire to do something big, you know, in a funny kind of way ... I'm a manual worker really. I like working with me hands, and sculpturing is the essence of working with your hands, it's a kind of a manipulation. If I had my time to begin again, I'd be a manual worker again. The opening words of Laurie Wheatley, a South Shields born plasterer, and a self-taught sculptor, painter and photographer, who claimed that the only thing he really knew anything about was music. At the age of seventy he was commissioned by Amber to produce his first ever life-size model, for the River Project.
The film observes the traditional ‘waste-mould’ process, as Laurie’s clay model goes through its various metamorphoses, finally to emerge as a powerful and compelling statue of a shipyard welder, which stands to this day in Side Gallery. While working, Laurie talks about his highly personal philosophy, resulting in a film which is both a record of a single artistic endeavour and an intimate portrait of an unusual and accomplished man.
Laurie Wheatley was a member of a group of South Shields artists in the 1930s, part of the broader movement that included the Ashington Painters and the work that came out of the Spennymoor Settlement. A sense of connection to this flowering of working class art has always been important to Amber. In the early 1970s Amber commissioned Laurie to document both the river and Tyneside’s changing urban centre.
The film was shot with an ancient Camiflex, soundproofed with a lead-lined box or blimp, which it took three people to move. Made on a shoe-string budget, the film is one of Amber’s celebratory portraits, a strand which includes Maybe (1968) and Mai (1973).
AMBER FILMS
Made with financial assistance from Northern Arts.
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