Close and Remote are Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter. Regular collaborators include Roney Fraser-Munroe and Jon Dovey.
We have established a national practice working on commissions with a range of organisations. Recently, we have worked with Brigstow Institute (Bristol University), Cabot Institute for the Environment (Bristol University), Cultural Engine, Stoke Newington Literary Festival, FACT, Creative Barking & Dagenham, Essex Cultural Diversity Partnership and Home Slough.
We are currently involved in several film projects, working with a number of collaborators. ‘We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher’ is a wide collaboration with a network of artists, musicians and writers, exploring the work of critical theorist Mark Fisher. The project takes the process of ‘making a film’ and publicly develops through an instagram account – @markfisherfilm. This will be screened later in 2025, along with a number of events.
Our other film in the works cannot be talked about, but has been shot over the last year. We hope to bring this to audiences very soon.
In 2024 we worked with University of Bristol, University of Oxford and Sheffield University on ‘Live Model’, a new performance game exploring Net Zero. This has been funded by the British Academy. The project has been toured to Leeds and Bristol. Live Model will now morph into a work with new participants in Sydney, Australia.
‘Orchard’, commissioned by Cultural Engine in 2024, shows how new green spaces play an important role in terms of bio-diversity and social well-being. Cherry Orchard Jubilee Country Park in Rochford, Essex, is an example of an evolving new park that could otherwise have been swallowed up by new housing and industrial estates.
From 2024 to 2025 we are working as lead artists/facilitators with the Brigstow Institute and Cabot Institute for the Environment’s Personal to the Planetary cohort of 10 fellows. The fellows include activists, artists, academics, writers and scientists who have been brought together for a deep and sustained engagement around the climate emergency. A new publication and a talks programme as planned for November 2025.
Recent project ‘Large Blue’ has seen us collaborate with other artists, activists and academics to envision and think about personal responses to climate change. We often get asked to work speculatively with groups of people and situations that evolve over time, quite often in relation to locations that are forgotten or peripheral. Watch Large Blue here.
Our working processes and materials are broad, based on being experienced at making and being responsive to different situations. We have worked with watercolours, VR, AR, film, performance, music, walking, drawing, workbooks and often online.
In the course of making longer range projects, we often invite different people in to the working process, as collaborators and makers. This enables us to scale our work and broaden the range of what we offer to commissioners. For Large Blue we invited in Jon Dovey to assist with production and film direction, along with musician Jean-Pierre Rasle to co-compose the music. We have found that many of these initial collaborations turn in to longer-term working relationships.
We have considerable experience of working with large universities and local authorities. From this we have learned the value of building co-creative methods and devising sessions that enable us to define richer projects at the outset.
We developed these working values some while ago now but they still seem to work for us:
• The obvious is always present
• The edge of a situation has value
• There is no such thing as content
• Lifestyles are not defined only by technologies
• Uncertainty is preferable over innovation
• Aesthetics contain cultural currency and agency
Get in contact with us here, if you have a project or programme to discuss.
Updated: May 2025
Email: info@closeandremote.net