![]() | This article contains wording that promotes the subject in a subjective manner without imparting real information.(September 2025) |
Sarah Tremlett | |
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Born | Sarah Tremlett 1956 Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England |
Nationality | British |
Occupation(s) | artist-philosopher, writer, poet, poetry film theorist, poetry filmmaker |
Notable work | The Poetics of Poetry Film |
Awards | FRSA |
Website | www.sarahtremlett.com |
Sarah Tremlett FRSA (born in 1956, Sheffield, Yorkshire) [1] is a British artist-philosopher, writer, poet, leading poetry film theorist, [2] and acclaimed poetry filmmaker. [3] She is known for working with subjectivity and voice, experimental video poetry [4] and poetry films. [5]
Tremlett is best known as the primary author and editor of The Poetics of Poetry Film. [6] This 400-page "groundbreaking, industry bible" [7] establishes the merging of historical forms from song, visual and lyric poetry alongside the origins of film, animation and performance, and interweaves philosophical threads through the genre. Indeed, as the book demonstrates, poetry film explores "the intersection between poetry, film and philosophy", [8] termed "connective aesthetics". [9] It also introduces many approaches to its practice via the voices of numerous artists, including some from Spain, Portugal and Argentina, and provides a world survey. [10]
While some of her work as filmmaker is speculative and venturesome, some is commissioned. [11]
She is an artist and theorist who had been a fashion model in her youth. [12] This is documented in her poetic memoir Horse-Woman, [13] which revisits a traumatic and bohemian period in her past, writing, painting and modelling whilst living in a bedsit in London. It features a selection of her paintings from the time, focusing on belonging and identity. A lonely child, she had a horse as a companion, which was subsequently sold. In this account of events, her psyche creates a mythical otherkin horse persona which protects her and interweaves with her experiences in the fashion world.
Her major lifetime's work Tree is a long-running investigation into her unknown family history and includes prose, poetry and poetry films. [14]
As editor of Liberated Words online, [15] she is a pre-eminent figure in bringing poetry film to the public in the United Kingdom and at festivals worldwide. A frequent juror at Liberated Words and major festivals, [16] she is passionate about poetry film as a vehicle for us to "voice who we are, not who we are told to be". [17]
Tremlett was brought up by oldish parents [18] in a rambling, old house with a large garden, [19] According to her memoir Horse-Woman, she became a cleaner and gardener for them while still very young. [20] She later became a model, [21] notably for the bohemian fashion designer Thea Porter, [22] modelling for the Hollywood legend Lauren Bacall in New York. [23] She left fashion and worked backstage at Cambridge Arts Theatre, where she made costumes for the landmark "100 Years of the Cambridge Greek Play". [24] She also made hand-painted lampshades with "cave paintings" on them, which were sold at Aspects and at Practical Styling, the household goods and furniture outlet near Centre Point owned by Tommy Roberts. [25]
In the 1980s she exhibited her paintings, as well as writing novels and plays. [26] She worked for Silent Books, Swavesey, Cambridgeshire, producing and marketing art and poetry books illustrated with wood engravings. [27]
From 1995 to 1998, Tremlett and her partner, the science publisher Robin Rees, [28] lived and worked in the United States, where they were married. [29] They had two daughters, [30] the performer and special effects and make-up artist Hatti Rees aka XaiLA and the singer and performer Georgie Rees. Tremlett showed her paintings [31] and wrote scripts including the stage play, The Forger (about the emotional relationship between a forger and a curator), which was commissioned by First Stage and performed at the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware. [32]
Tremlett completed an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University (2001), [33] and went on to gain a distinction in a Fine Art Practice degree at Buckinghamshire New University (2005) with her thesis "Women and Text". [34] She also worked as a proofreader and copy editor for Brian May's London Stereoscopic Company. [35] In 2015 she completed a research degree at the University of the Arts London titled "Re : turning from graphic verse to digital poetics". [36]
Since 2008 she has presented papers and essays, centring on subjectivity, image [37] and voice, and the intersection between poetry, film and philosophy. Her early experimental work with moving concrete poetry explored audiovisual language (and its materiality) onscreen viewed through a non-dualist, philosophical lens. See her later essay "Exploring Contemplative Effects in Text-based Videopoems" (2017) published by Poetry Film Magazin [38] and accessible on the online sites: Academia and Atticus Review. She was described as a "Visual Philosopher" by Karina Karaeva of the NCCA National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow, who exhibited her videopoems: Blanks in Discourse : 06 at VideoFormat – [Linearity] Impakt Festival, 2009 and Patterned Utterance and Blanks in Discourse : 03 at Modus Group and Sarah Tremlett with Project Fabrika, 2010. [39]
A solo show Voices or Silences / Garsai Ar Tyla at the Cultural Communication Centre, Klaipeda, Lithuania in 2009 explored text and subjectivity in print and onscreen. [40] In 2012 the first MIX conference was born, and with the poet Lucy English she formed the project Liberated Words to screen poetry films from around the world.
Unusually, she has worked with her daughters in her poetry films – in front of and behind the camera. For both daughters onscreen with Tremlett, see Villanelle for Elizabeth not Ophelia and Selfie with Marilyn In the latter Hatti plays Marilyn Monroe in front of the camera and Georgie photographed Marilyn when she was still called Norma Jeane. This poetry film, with poem by the American poet Heidi Seaborn and commissioned by the Visible Poetry Project, won the Maldito Video Poetry Festival prize in 2021. [41]
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This project was founded in 2012 by Sarah Tremlett and Lucy English [71] to promote poetry filmmaking through the organizing of events, projects and festivals. [72] Tremlett has initiated and managed workshops with dance students and school children, [73] teenagers with autism, [74] as well as with older dementia patients in a local hospital. [75]
As editor of Liberated Words online she has been expanding upon the subject of poetry films and has identified and spearheaded forms such as ekphrastic poetry films (based on paintings) and family history poetry films. All the festival screenings under the aegis of the Liberated Words project may be viewed on the website.
Tremlett launched an ekphrastic poetry film prize in 2022 at LYRA Poetry Festival, Bristol entitled Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow I (with a bilingual edition Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow II / Cuadro a Cuadros: Tus Ojos Siguen II in 2023). [76] Since the launch at FOTOGENIA in Mexico City she toured the book and screening in 2024. [77]
Poem Film Editions was launched by Tremlett with the poet and poetry filmmaker Csilla Toldy in 2024 to publish books that cross over between poetry and film, and also word and image publications.
Tremlett's own ongoing project hosted under Family History at Liberated Words to showcase poetry films on the theme of family history.
"What makes this collection so unique, besides the QR code-based format, is its emphasis on the ekphrastic videopoem. Just as Ana Segovia's painting Huapango Torero serves as a filmmaker's portal for new meanings, this anthology is likewise a portal as the reader is encouraged to move seamlessly between the page and streaming online content via QR codes. Not only is this collection truly innovative and collaborative in spirit ... this anthology brings the poetry film festival directly to the reader in a way that hasn't quite been done before. The Spanish translations by Camilo Bosso also allow for transnational and transcultural dialogues between artists, poets, and filmmakers." [78] Patricia Killelea assistant professor of English, Northern Michigan University.
"Sarah Tremlett's The Poetics of Poetry Film: Film Poetry, Videopoetry, Lyric Voice, Reflection offers a breathtaking range of glimpses at the historical flashpoints, formal anatomy, and major and minor contemporary makers and trends ... The Poetics of Poetry Film should serve as an important resource for scholars and filmmakers interested in contemporary aesthetic trends in this interdisciplinary field." [79] Rebecca A. Sheehan, professor of cinema studies, California State University.
"The Poetics of Poetry Film functions as an extensive survey of the field of poetry film, film poetry, videopoetry and the many related methodologies. . . . Tremlett's voice carries with it a level of authority due to her work as both a scholar on the subject as well as a practicing artist in network with the international collection of practitioners included in the volume." [80] Gabrielle McNally, associate professor of digital cinema, Northern Michigan University.
"[T]he formalists offered ostranenie, making something strange in the artwork, be it a poem, a novel, a film, even music or a painting. Making something strange also required 'making art difficult in order to heighten one's perception' . . . In the work Some Everybodies, Sarah Tremlett trains her camera on a street corner but renders the scene and the sound in more than half speed slow motion. An everyday scene is instantly defamiliarized, voices become blurred, indiscernible. Narrative space is perceived as strange, compared to real time." Tom Konyves, theorist and videopoet. [81]
"It's taking that subject matter [abuse of women], but at the same time there is this act of resistance, I saw the red lips as a flag of resistance. It's one and the same time both a giving in to that expectation to be a certain way and to not see the person but see the stereotype – what we have done to that subject – versus at the same time owning it. Taking it back." [82] Mary McDonald, poetry filmmaker and educator.
"I felt its emotional impact immediately and I was hooked by the multiple 'conversations' taking place through time. The voices are many: Heidi, Hatti, the artist, the haunting dialogue within Heidi's poem between Marilyn (as performance), Norma Jeane (as performance to a pre-Hollywood audience) and "meta-Marilyn" (or is that Heidi as the speaker of the poem?) who observes her various selves in action. Hatti's interpretation and 'embodying' of these fragile voices was subtle and shifting and rewards many viewings. There's a powerful sense of exploration and experimentation taking place in the piece – an extended improvisation . . . The structure refuses any fixed apprehension of what it might be to perform 'woman'." [83] Meriel Lland, ecopoet, photographer, nature writer and film poet.
"[It] was the built-in cut from persona to person that confirmed what had so moved me, which was Hatti's off-camera glance to the script. By built-in cut from persona to person I mean the context of an acting rehearsal and performance, delivery or attempted delivery of lines – it was a good idea to present and leave the takes as takes whose integrity, of gender and identity, juxtaposed as they are with each other, is multiplied across the three screens. Interesting how we move fractured, fragmented, ever so slowly from the screen on the left, to the right, with sound overlapping (distancing effect notwithstanding) to the centre, whose voice 'mutes' the Marilyn/Hatti on either side, conferring a resolved 'final' meaning to the performance ... Each glance off-camera is a shock to my system of understanding; she's a Marilyn-Hatti hybrid that becomes Hatti when she glances aside. Rinse, repeat." [84] Tom Konyves, videopoet and theorist.
"In terms of how Hatti aimed at being both Marilyn and Hatti and sometimes failed, this seems particularly poignant given our ubiquitous struggle during the pandemic and even before to navigate that gap between our online selves and our actual lives and identities. Selfie with Marilyn examines the tension in a subjective gaze—charting the shifting agency from viewer to viewed, or perhaps more accurately, playing with those ever-shifting power dynamics. And [ultimately] as Tremlett says, poetry film opens a 'rich and vital creative channel for us all to voice who we are, not who we are told to be, whilst sending ethical messages which are pertinent and critical in contemporary life today'. This is a powerful aspiration, one that deeply resonates with the intentions of this journal, as well as my own practice." [85] Rita Mae Reese, poet and fiction writer
"The sound is indeed central in Sarah Tremlett's videos which means she has achieved a full, mature conscience in the balance between the instruments of videopoetry. . . . In Patterned Utterance II, in front of us we have three fixed data screens, from a scanning probe microscope. As the microscope reads, so the black screens begin to scan in red (top to bottom) slowly unveiling the surface of a piece of silicon from three positions, showing changes in the scanning data. When the spoken word is heard, white lines appear on the screens. Here the game of revelation/unrevelation is given by the voice, which in the first part speaks clear statements like 'the impossibility of making the same error twice', 'transforming/distributing/storing' whereas in the second one, there is still the voice but the scan and the recording reverses; consequently, the meaning disappears. Thanks to these two videos I can develop a meditation about time which is very important in videopoetry. She/Seasons ('the sons of the sea, she sees the sons') is a philosophical declaration about the flow of time, not only the seasons, the sons who grow, youth, old age, but also the time to read, to understand, to accumulate knowledge. Patterned Utterance needs all its lasting eight minutes to reach the effect of listening/unlistening, even including the long pauses between the sentences or the words according to a precious rule introduced by John Cage: we need the silence to meditate inside ourselves the meaning of what we hear!" [86] Enzo Minarelli, polypoet, sound poet, performer, theorist.