TRAMWAY, GLASGOW (FOR GLASGOW INTERNATIONAL 2026) 

DEFILING RAIN

Screened on June 12th and June 13th 2026.

 

Defiling Rain is a new and ongoing artwork by Jamie Crewe. It is a collection of short audio-visual vignettes which take the opinionated animals and personified weather of medieval fables and abandon them in a city struck by disaster.

Each vignette is a song, with music performed by (so far) Richy Carey on bass guitar, Liam Chapman on drums and percussion, Ross Taylor on keyboards, and Luki, Colin Self, and Jamie Crewe on vocals. Their lyrics describe fraught and fantastical scenarios that fall short of offering advice. They are fables with the tails lopped off, or the heads removed.

A headless fable has no guiding principle, and no unifying faculty: its intention is removed, and its coherence thwarted. A tailless fable leaves no wake: it ends too quickly, bluntly, or indigestibily for a lesson to adhere. Chopped at either end, the narratives of Defiling Rain deglove, and their middles writhe.

Defiling Rain uses puppetry, model sets, hand animation, collages, and appropriated footage, run through the effects of a Roland V-4EX video mixer and a CRT television. These stories without morals are lit by strange light: images don’t illustrate texts, but illuminate them from askance angles (like a torch under the chin, or the long shadows of golden hour, or the flash of lighting which announces the arrival of a storm).

The vignettes of Defiling Rain are screened in an endlessly randomised order, looping with no clear start or conclusion. There is no defintive arc to the work, and viewers can encounter endless permutations of it. Jamie intends to make more vignettes in further tranches of the work, which will be added to this randomised order: the current thirty vignettes will grow to around one hundred and twenty, and what is currently elusive will become completely overwhelming.

In Defiling Rain authority has fled, or been overturned. The materials of commentary and instruction are deranged, and with their remains the work stages the awe, horror and joy of disintegration. This is a way to think about disaster—life beyond, and without.

The first form of Defiling Rain was commissioned by the University of Edinburgh Art Collection and LUX Scotland. It was presented at Tramway as part of Glasgow International 2026. The screening closed with I Plied My Poesy, an event in which Jamie, Ross, Liam and Richy played  songs from Defiling Rain while Jamie discussed the project, aided by a camera in the rafters trained on her sketchbooks.

 

A link to view a mocked-up, randomised playthrough of Defiling Rain is available on request.

This work is dedicated to Xenia Rostern.