Commons – A Film by David Blandy

Drawing on the collections of objects and specimens at The Beaney and The Amelia Scott, Tunbridge Wells, Commons is an expansive moving image work that combines archive film with three-dimensional scans and newly captured footage of ancient rocks and woodland: common land preserved for all. This collage of samples reveals a series of stories told by multiple voices; like the Pilgrims of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the non-human subjects and objects recount chronicles of their experience, over years or millennia, deliberately decentring human existence. Inspired by the natural world and notions of resistance, these characters are brought together on a pilgrimage across deep time, each speaking from their own subjectivity.

The work weaves together Amelia Scott’s activism; Kent film-maker Frank P. Barnitt’s mid 1930s nature observations; a fox, a crow, a kingfisher, a 135 million year old fossilised bone and a lost mobile phone into a layered story of pilgrimage.

Commissioned for The Open Road by Film and Video Umbrella and Kent and Medway Museum Partnership National Portfolio Organisation. Supported by Screen Archive South East. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

The Garden Room, Ground Floor, The Beaney

Saturday 3 October 2026 to Sunday 31 January 2027 (Closed Mondays)

Donations welcome