Lavinia Greenlaw

Lavinia Greenlaw

Lavinia Greenlaw is a writer known for investigating the shared imperatives of art and science. She has published five collections of poetry, most recently The Casual Perfect and A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde. Her other books include The Importance of Music to Girls and Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland. She was the first artist-in-residence at London's Science Museum and one of the first artists to be given a Wellcome Engagement Fellowship. Audio Obscura, her immersive soundwork for Artangel/Manchester International Festival, won the 2011 Ted Hughes Award. She was Professor of Poetry at the University of East Anglia until 2013.


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.
The Sea is an Edge and an Ending will be shown as part of Points of Departure exhibition.

Commissioned by FVU with the support of Wellcome Trust and Metal. FVU is supported by Arts Council England.

Sound of the Thames Delta panel talk: The Importance of Music to GirlsWriter and artist Lavinia Greenlaw reads from her memoir (Faber & Faber 2007) of country-dancing, piano-playing, Essex village-hall discos  and the coming of punk.


Estuary Festival is supported by

Creative_Estuary_New_1