Becky Hemus: Do you want to begin by speaking about the work, and how it came to be?
Lucy Meyle: I was reading this book called Animal Capital by Nicole Shukin, which is all about the extraction of materials from animals. She uses a term — “material unconscious” — in relation to how this extraction is inherent in lots of things but under-discussed, or often elided.
In Shukin’s book, she talks about how in the 1880s, the Eastman Dry Plate Company was almost brought to ruin by a bad batch of film that was producing foggy, overexposed images. They started an arm of the company to investigate, and it was only in 1925 that researchers discovered that the gelatin they thought was just a passive layer — holding the silver halide crystals — was actually causing those crystals to be more or less sensitive to light. Specifically, cows that had eaten mustard plants produced gelatin with a higher sulphur content, which significantly increased its sensitivity. Dr. C. E. Kenneth Mees, a scientist at Kodak, later reflected: “Twenty years ago, we found out that if cows didn’t like mustard there wouldn’t be any movies at all.”
Ziggy Lever: And the Eastman Dry Plate Company responded in the 1880s by buying up abattoirs across America to try to control their gelatin production — though they didn’t yet understand why that mattered.
Lucy: And it’s still there, right? Any analog photography or moving image film still has gelatin as a base layer — it’s not a superseded technology. So to us, it was really interesting to try to surface the image of the mustard or the cow, and recognise that the image of the cow and the mustard is literally there in what we’re making. We had a lot of conversations around where the cow is in the film — which is a funny question to return to. And for us, it was like: the film became the cow. Film had pushed the cow out of the picture, hidden the gelatin underneath layers of process — so we were recognising that our entire film was, in a way, the cow. That also became how we structured the film, thinking about the stomachs of the cow as helping us to process the film itself.
Becky: Can you talk about the ways this manifests? When someone interacts with your image, what fruits of this mustard seed are they seeing?
Ziggy: The first roll we shot was of cows in Taranaki. While we were shooting, we started thinking about the filmic process of developing and exposing an image alongside the processes of the cow’s stomach — which has different functions around removing heavy metals or breaking down materials into different components. That became a structural framework for how we edited the film. Quite late in the piece, we added what almost function as intertitles — filmed diagrams of the cow’s stomach showing the four chambers: the Rumen, Reticulum, Omasum, and Abomasum — and they become like sections, where conceptually we’re inside one of those chambers.
So we were thinking about moving from the mustard plant growing in our back garden, to being mulched into water, to entering a kind of studio space where we had the plants on top of a glass table and were filming from underneath — coming into contact with the surface of the image. Then we took some of that film and looked at it under the microscope. We were trying to break down the image itself — chromatography and other processes — and then we returned back to the field, to the mustard field. But that film at the end has gone through another process of digestion itself, because it’s hand-processed E6 Ektachrome, and you can see the colours moving about quite wildly. The digestion cycle of the cow is mirrored in the processing of thought — for us that was a poetic driver.
Lucy: And obviously there’s also something about it being held within the everyday — a sense of relatable encounter. We chose to plant mustard seeds ourselves and grow the mustard plant in our garden throughout the project. A lot of the close-ups you see in the film are mustard we grew. That was an important process for us, to have an everyday relationship to it. I think when we work with snails as well, they occupy this common, garden-variety space — and I think that’s interesting, that something so common can be so wild, yeah.
Becky: Your projects often centre around animals, but start with quite specific seeds or ideas that on their surface seem disconnected. Do you feel like the physical manifestation of the projects is often quite far away from where they began?
Ziggy: With the project before this — Snail Time — we started from thinking about the snail’s shell as a spiral, and time as a spiral. We were looking at helixes, and that led us to research the Roman vivarium, where animals were farmed and kept in this kind of enclosed garden space, and that made us think about a ramp that might mobilise the viewer into a spiral as well. So yeah, there’s often a wider, more abstract idea, and in this case it was about breaking down film into its different components and trying to see what that might yield.
Lucy: I also think that what draws us is something on the border of absurdity and believability — and in that wavering there’s the possibility to expand it somewhat. The fact about the cow and the gelatin in film is real, whereas the conjecture about the snail experiencing time as a spiral is not proven. But I think that’s where the work lives: what if this? That’s a core component of how we make work together, and separately.
Becky: And do you find that kind of magic — the absurdity that opens up in nature — more exciting than, say, a purely technological inquiry?
Lucy: To me, nature and technology are deeply intertwined, which is why this film was so fascinating to make. I didn’t even know that film still contains gelatin — that was kind of shocking, something so basic and fundamental about a technology that’s been around for so long, and that I use. It implicated me directly in my own material unconscious — the material unconscious of animals within this medium. I think finding those things out is interesting first and foremost, but then understanding what an artwork can bring to that conversation is also fertile ground.
Becky: And the exhibition at Govett-Brewster — it’s installed in a way where the work is spilling out onto the street?
Ziggy: Yes — it’s their “open window” format, and I think we’re the second commission for it. It’s an eight-by-nine ratio, which is quite tall, almost square but not — very different from a smartphone vertical. We shot the film with that ratio in mind. We also cut a Super 16 version, which we are going to screen at Gus Fisher Gallery in August.
The soundtrack became quite important to us — it wasn’t certain there would be one until quite late. We made the soundtrack over a few days using an analog synthesiser, frequency generator, autoharp, alto saxophone, trumpet, and field recordings. We fed the sounds through a four track tape recorder as a loop, listening and improvising as we watched the edited footage. The loop helped us think through the idea of cycling in both the life cycle of the mustard plant, the developing of film, and the cow’s digestive system. But now it is really spilling onto the street, which is a beautiful thing, especially at night, because of the luminance of the screen and the vibrancy of the colours from the plants.
Lucy: Something we thought about while making it was that because it’s behind a window, there’s this sense of an interruption of the image with the glass — you’re looking at the surface. And that influenced some of the footage we made.
Ziggy: We talked about the seed of the mustard plant, the pixel on a digital screen, and the grain of a photograph — how those things are conceptually related, and how we might think about breaking those objects apart and bringing them back together. That’s why we were interested in looking at the film through a microscope: trying to find the grain. What we actually found was the residue on the surface — little things caught in the film as a matter of processing. The accidental artifact.
Lucy: Everything gets translated through different processes — the thing that’s observed is captured into the film, and “captured” has connotations too, around capturing an animal. Then the image runs through the process, we look at it under the microscope, it becomes a digital image, and it has this relationship to the pixel. We were interested in moving through all those translations.
Ziggy: And what gets caught accidentally within those translations — which has a relationship, I think, to the cow accidentally getting caught in this process. The mustard plant getting caught in the process of making film.
Ziggy Lever & Lucy Meyle
If cows didn’t like mustard
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
28 FEB – 19 JUL 2026
