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Project Overview

The poet Lavinia Greenlaw has written and directed The Sea is an Edge and an Ending, a short film investigating what it means to lose your memory and disappear into the present tense. Its framework is a sequence she wrote about her father’s death from Alzheimer’s. The film focuses on what it means for your sense of self to come loose and for the past to float free. It carries echoes of Shakespeare’s Tempest in its study of a man under a kind of spell, whose child must observe his strange and terrifying liberation. The film moves from the shifting coastal landscape of the east of England, a geography central to Greenlaw’s life and work, to eroded interiors containing only the bare structures and reduced emblems of this man’s life. The Sea is an Edge and an Ending is Greenlaw’s first film and extends the practice she developed in her award-winning sound work, Audio Obscura.

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Read text by Lavinia Greenlaw

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Read text by Lavinia Greenlaw

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Read text by Lavinia Greenlaw

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Read text by Lavinia Greenlaw

Project details

Project links

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FVU Curates: Somewhere Becoming Sea

Humber Street Gallery, Hull

5 April 2017 - 17 June 2017

The Sea is an Edge and an Ending

Estuary 2016: Points of Departure

17 September 2016 - 30 September 2016

The Sea is an Edge and an Ending

Awake But Always Dreaming, Shoreditch Church, London

24 November 2016 - 18 November 2024

The Sea is an Edge and an Ending

Medicine Unboxed, Cheltenham

19 November 2016 - 18 November 2024

The Sea is an Edge and an Ending

BRAINFest 2017, Cambridge.

23 June 2017 - 18 November 2024

The Sea is an Edge and an Ending

Goldsmiths, University of London

18 October 2017 - 18 November 2024

The Sea is an Edge and an Ending

Poetry in Aldeburgh 2017

5 November 2017 - 18 November 2024

More information

Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Metal with the support of Wellcome Trust. Supported by Arts Council England.

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Press

The Guardian | 'The Saturday Poem: My Father Cannot Stop'

17 September 2016
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