This tape is the last in the ‘Three Seasons’ series for Channel 4’s Eleventh Hour programme.  ‘Autumn’ is a psychological landscape in which different facets of a woman’s personality and experience are played out and resolved – if temporarily.  Different elements in the landscape are at times malevolent or benign, symbols of creativity and fecundity or missiles of self-destruction.  The real and the imagined are interchangeable, internal and external events fuse.  The landscape is a canvas on which images are continually worked and reworked. They become analogous to the strength and resilience of the autumnal woman portrayed mostly by my sister Rosamund Elwes and sometimes by myself.

Autumn was set in the same suburban garden as Spring and Winter.  Each season offered an image of woman at different stages of her life and Autumn represented a dream of maturity in that images of briefcases, papers and high-heeled efficiency drift in and out of sensual images of the landscape. The woman’s permeability to the sounds and moods of the landscape betray both the richness and difficulty that contemporary life  now offers women.  Each dissolve is a shift into another mode of being. Mother, worker, dreamer, avenging angel all circulate seamlessly and as in Snow White’s nightmare flight through the woods, the landscape echoes her moods and transformations.

Catherine Elwes