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THIS is a big year for Alchemy. Richard Ashrowan’s artist filmmaking showcase will soon curate Rachel Maclean’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale, but it kicked off its seventh annual film festival in Hawick with what’s become one of its most innovative and accessible strands: a series of moving image installations in repurposed buildings across the town.

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Much gentler is Jacques Perconte’s Buccleuch Chuch on the Kirk Burn at the recently closed-down Peter Scott knitwear factory. A glitch artist, Perconte has manipulated digital images of hundreds of storm-felled trees in the nearby Ettrick forest to create an abstract portrait of nature that’s pleasingly meditative.

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