Sarah Tremlett


Sarah Tremlett is a British artist-philosopher, writer, poet, poetry film theorist, and poetry filmmaker. She is known for working with subjectivity and voice, experimental video poetry and poetry films.
Tremlett is best known as the primary author and editor of The Poetics of Poetry Film. This 400-page "ground-breaking, industry bible" establishes the merging of historical forms from song, visual and lyric poetry alongside the origins of film, animation and performance. It interweaves philosophical threads through the genre and introduces a world survey of artists in their own voices.
She was a fashion model in her youth. This is documented in her poetic memoir Horse-Woman, which revisits a traumatic and bohemian period in her past, writing, painting and modelling whilst living in a bedsit in London.
She is editor of the poetry film website online.
Her project Tree is a long-running investigation into her unknown family history and includes prose, poetry and poetry films.

Early life

Tremlett was brought up by oldish parents. She later became a model, notably for the bohemian fashion designer Thea Porter, modelling for the Hollywood legend Lauren Bacall in New York. She left fashion and worked backstage at Cambridge Arts Theatre, where she made costumes for the landmark "100 Years of the Cambridge Greek Play". 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.
In the 1980s she exhibited her paintings. She worked for Silent Books, Swavesey, Cambridgeshire, producing and marketing art and poetry books illustrated with wood engravings.

Career

From 1995 to 1998, Tremlett and her partner, the science publisher Robin Rees, lived and worked in the United States, where they were married. Tremlett showed her paintings and wrote scripts including the stage play, The Forger, which was commissioned by First Stage and performed at the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware.
Tremlett completed an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University, and went on to gain a distinction in a Fine Art Practice degree at Buckinghamshire New University with her thesis "Women and Text". In 2015 she completed a research degree at the University of the Arts London titled "Re : turning from graphic verse to digital poetics".
Since 2008 she has presented papers and essays, centring on subjectivity, image and voice, and the intersection between poetry, film and philosophy. She was described as a "Visual Philosopher" by Karina Karaeva of the NCCA National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow, who exhibited her video poems: Blanks in Discourse : 06 at VideoFormat – Impakt Festival, 2009 and Patterned Utterance and Blanks in Discourse : 03 at Modus Group and Sarah Tremlett with , 2010.
A solo show Voices or Silences / Garsai Ar Tyla at the , Lithuania in 2009 explored text and subjectivity in print and onscreen. In 2012 the first was born, and with the poet Lucy English she formed the project Liberated Words to screen poetry films from around the world.
She has worked with her two daughters, Hatti and Georgie, in her poetry films: see and , where Hatti plays Marilyn. This poetry film, with poem by the American poet and commissioned by the , won the Maldito Video Poetry Festival prize in 2021.

Lectures and presentations

Key speaker

  • "The Word as a Leaf", Por La Tierra / For the Earth, Buenos Aires, Argentina
  • at , Mexico City, Mexico
  • "Sound in Videopoetry", a lecture given at "New Art Emerging: Two or Three Things One Should Know About Videopoetry", Surrey City Centre Library, Surrey, Vancouver, Canada, 2022, convened by Tom Konyves in relation to the exhibition 2022, where Tremlett's video poem was featured for the years 2008–10

    Presentations

2008
  • "Matternal Philosophy, Female Subjectivity and Text in Art", Consciousness Reframed Conference IX, University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Presentation, screening, book chapter. Video poems: Blanks in Discourse : 05; Blanks in Discourse : 06; Patterned Utterance
2009
  • Voices or Silences / Garsai Ar Tyla solo show, , Klaipeda, Lithuania
  • "Design and Non-Dualist Filmic Experience", Consciousness Reframed X – 10th Annual Planetary Collegium International Research Conference, experiencing design, behaving media, , Munich, Germany. Presentation paper, screening, book chapter. Video poem some everybodies
2010
2011
  • "Text, Light and Matternal Philosophy of Practice", Chelsea College of Arts Library and Old College Library, London. From Kinetic Works to Digital Poetics, exhibition of Liliane Lijn's cones and sketchbooks and Sarah Tremlett's poetry film Patterned Utterance. Interview with Liliane Lijn, Chelsea Lecture Theatre
2012
  • "The Word as a Leaf", Por La Tierra / For the Earth, VideoBardo video poetry festival, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Invited speaker, paper with video poems: AMAM AMMA and She, Seasons, Contemplating Nature
  • "Perception and Videoprosody", Bath Spa University, Bath. Presentation paper and video poem: Error, Eros
2013
  • "Between art, poetry and film: Remediating the moving digital poem", Text on Screens, MIX conference, Bath Spa University, Bath
  • "From Prosody to Moving Prosody", e-Poetry conference, Kingston University, London. Presentation and video poems: Error, Eros and She, Seasons, Contemplating Nature
2014
  • "Re: Turning – rhythm and poetry film", the South Bank , London. Presentation and screening
  • "Poetry Film and Form", Liberated Words III, Reflections and Memory 1914–2014, partly held at Arnolfini Art Gallery, the YMCA and at
2015
  • TARP – Audio Visual Poetry Film Festival, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Lithuania. Presentation and screening of video poems. Also , Kinza restaurant, Vilnius
2017
2019
  • Paper River, MIX Conference, Bath Spa University. Presentation of excerpt from Tree family-history chronicle and project, with reading of prose poetry and screening
  • "Unseen Forces and the Protagonist's Point of View", State of the Art – British Poetry Films, , Berlin. Presenting six British poetry films; presentation essay also in The Poetics of Poetry Film and
  • Also presenting at ZEBRA "Liberated Words Workshops" at Colloquium: The Eye of the Poem. How do British and German students approach the making of poetry films? , and Sarah Tremlett talk about their work in Great Britain and Germany. Presentation and screening
2020
  • "Latin_no American VideoPoetics", , Bristol. A from VideoBardo video poetry festival, Buenos Aires, Argentina; hosted by Rebecca Kosick, organized by Sarah Tremlett
2021
  • The Poetics of Poetry Film, , Bristol Poetry Institute, in collaboration with the Indisciplinary Poetics Research Cluster, April 2021
  • , March, 2021, screened at: 9th International Video Poetry Festival, Athens, 6 June 2021
  • , , Director FOTOGENIA Film Poetry and Divergent Narratives Festival no. III, Mexico City, Mexico, 24–7 November 2021
  • "The Poetics of Poetry Film and the role of videopoetry and poetry film today", Poética de Sara Tremlett, bilingual , director of VideoBardo Festival, Buenos Aires, Festival Internacional de Videopoesía 25 años, 25th anniversary of VideoBardo Festival, 29 November 2021
2022
  • "Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow" Ekphrastic Poetry Film prize, , Bristol. Presentation,
  • "The Poetics of Poetry Film: Diegesis and New Dialogic Frameworks", Arts in Society conference, Zaragoza, Spain, book presentation and screening
  • "Poetry Film – an enquiry into defining a poetic genre", DCAC Conference, Ionian Academy of the Ionian University, Corfu .
  • "Sound in Videopoetry", New Art Emerging: Two or Three Things One Should Know About Videopoetry symposium, Surrey, Vancouver, Canada. Convener Tom Konyves. Presentation and screenings
  • Tree family history chronicle. , Vancouver, Canada. Reading with screening
  • Tree family history chronicle. Adobe Books, Mission, San Francisco, USA. Reading with screening about poetry films with the American poet Marc Zegans.
2023
  • Climate Change and Subjectivity, triad for , Houston and , Albacete, Spain. With leading video poets, the Australian and the Canadian . Including poems and films by Sarah Tremlett: I Cannot be Human and Villanelle for Elizabeth not Ophelia
  • "Narratives of Climate Crisis: Voicing Loss, Resistance and Hope through Poetry Film", MIX conference, Bath Spa University at the British Library, London with and
2023–4
  • Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow II / Cuadro a Cuadros: Tus Ojos Siguen II, a bilingual ekphrastic poetry anthology with QR link to poetry films based on various artworks, and the festival painting against bullfighting, machismo and animal cruelty. Published by . International presentation tour of the book and complete at FOTOGENIA festival, Mexico
2025
  • Horse-Woman, launch reading from Sarah Tremlett's poetic memoir, Frye Festival, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, 24 April 2025

    Publications

  • Tremlett, Sarah: . Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada: Basic Bruegel Editions, Chapbook Collection no. 4, March 2025 ;
  • Tremlett, Sarah, Bosso, Camilo : : Your Eyes Follow II: ekphrastic poetry + films / Cuadro a Cuadros: Tus Ojos Siguen II: cine + poesia ecfrástica. Bath: Poem Film Editions, May 2024
  • Tremlett, Sarah, with over 40 contributors: . Bristol: Intellect Books, distributed in North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Papua New Guinea by , 2021 print ; ePDF ; ePUB
  • Corbett, Patrick; Bissell, Norman; Ringrose, Philip; Tremlett, Sarah; Whalley, W. B. : . Edinburgh: Edinburgh Geological Society, 2021

    Contributing chapters

  • , in Blair, Lindsay; Manfredi, Camille : Intermedial Art Practices as Cultural Resilience. London: Routledge, 2024 e-book
  • "Tanz und Bewegung", in Naschert, Guido : Poetryfilmtage: Katalog 2023 = Poetry is dance: catalogue. Weimar: Literarische Gesellschaft Thüringen e.V. , 2023, pp. 80–4. German translation of "Dance and Movement", a chapter in The Poetics of Poetry Film. Bristol: Intellect Books, pp. 305–9
  • "The Thorny Complexities of Classification: Tom Konyves' the videopoem" in Naschert, Guido : Poetryfilmtage: Katalog 2023 = Poetry is dance: catalogue. Weimar: Literarische Gesellschaft Thüringen e.V. , 2023, pp. 68–76
  • "A Place for Poetry Film in the Language Classroom". Interview by Paul Simon in Simon, Paul: . Liège: University of Liège, Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres, master's thesis, 2020–1, pp. 41–7
  • "Time, Place and the Videopoetry Series" in LeBlanc, Valerie and Dugas, Daniel H.: Videopoetry / Vidéopoésie. St Catharines, Ontario: , 2020, pp. 377–89
  • "Experiential Storytelling: the Personal and Political Voice of Poetry Film meets Digital Media Authenticity, Profiling and the Panoptic Gaze", Poetry Film Magazin, no. 5. Weimar: Literarische Gesellschaft Thüringen e.V. , 2020, pp. 70–9
  • "Exploring Contemplative Effects in Text-Based Video Poems", Poetry Film Magazin, no. 3. Weimar: Literarische Gesellschaft Thüringen e.V. , 2017, pp. 32–5
  • "Exploring Contemplative Effects in Text-based Video Poems", in , 2017 and at , 2018
  • "Some Everybodies – Design and non-dualist filmic experience", , vol. 8, 2010, pp. 139–47,
  • Ekleksographia, Wave 2 Issue Four, ed. Judith Skillman, : Ahadada Books November 2009: essay: "Matternal Philosophy – gathering, dominion and the making of a video poem"; poem: "some everybodies" – the poem of the making of the video poem; screening of some everybodies
  • "Matternal Philosophy, Female Subjectivity and Text in Art" in Ascott, Roy; Fiel, Wolfgang : New Realities: Being Syncretic: IXth Consciousness Reframed Conference Vienna 2008, University of Applied Arts Vienna, July 3 - 5, 2008. Book of abstracts. Vienna: Springer, 2008, p. 79
  • "Matternal Philosophy, Female Subjectivity and Text in Art", in Ascott, Roy; Bast, Gerald; Fiel, Wolfgang New Realities: Being Syncretic. New York: Springer, 2008, pp. 292–6

    Contributions to anthologies

  • "Stimming Spell to Ward Off Neurotypical Banter" poem and kinetic poem, , Jim Andrews 2024
  • "A Villanelle for the Bees and Birds", Stravaig, no. 11, Geopoetics and the Climate Crisis. Argyll, Scotland: Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, June, 2022, p. 11
  • "Swan Wharf, Battersea Bridge, World's End", Stravaig, no. 10, From Alba to England. Argyll, Scotland: Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, January 2022, p. 50
  • "Paper River, Knotted River", Stravaig, no. 8: pt. 3, Rivers and Forests. Argyll, Scotland: Scottish Centre for Geopoetics, June 2020, p. 19
  • "Firewash" in Corbett, Patrick; Bissell, Norman; Ringrose, Philip; Tremlett, Sarah; Whalley, W. B. : Earth Lines: Geopoetry and Geopoetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Geological Society, 2021
  • "The Last Green Mile" in : . FeedARead.com, 2017, paperback

    Films and projects

Key poetry films

  • Video poet: Sarah Tremlett. Experimental, text-based, feminist video poem.
  • Video poet: Sarah Tremlett. Video poem with voice and microscopy experiment, where visual lines are caused by vibrations from the artist speaking.
  • Video poet: Sarah Tremlett. An experimental video poem, with slowed-down visuals and sound, recording a street corner and the people passing by.
  • Video poet: Sarah Tremlett. Experimental video poem with colour changes, text and star sounds.
  • . Poet for first half and filmmaker: Sarah Tremlett. Poet for second half: Lucy English. For The Book of Hours, poet Lucy English. The sun will rise again.
  • Director: Sarah Tremlett. Poet: Lucy English. A comparison between the changing sky and a relationship.
  • Filmmaker: Sarah Tremlett. Poet: Caleb Parkin. Experimental film about cycling and swallowing insects.
  • Poet and filmmaker: Sarah Tremlett from Tree family history chronicle and poetry collection. Connecting with a mediaeval ancestor.
  • or Filmmaker: Sarah Tremlett. Poet: Helen Johnson. A collaboration and commission from Helen Johnson, CAW, Brighton University, Brighton. A bird on the Christmas tree becomes the motif in a family narrative.
  • Poet and filmmaker: Sarah Tremlett. Ophelia does not drown in this retelling of the famous tale. Features: Sarah Tremlett, Hatti Rees and Georgie Rees.
  • Poet and filmmaker: Sarah Tremlett. The artist reflects on the importance of birds and a rabbit in her life.
  • Poet and filmmaker: Sarah Tremlett. XaiLA. A mime artist enacts man as bull with a horrible fate.
  • A film about a child who runs from her depressed mother. The poem is the Poetic Prologue from Horse-Woman, poetic memoir chap-book, Basic Bruegel Editions, Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, April 2025
  • "Sea of Po" Poet: Sarah Tremlett. Project creator: Jim Andrews. Poem about autism with kinetic computer programme.
  • Poet and filmmaker: Sarah Tremlett. Soundscape: Marc Neys. Additional images: Georgie Rees. An ancestor comes into close contact with a famous Victorian artist.

    Projects

This project was founded in 2012 by Sarah Tremlett and Lucy English to promote poetry filmmaking through the organizing of events, projects and festivals. Tremlett has initiated and managed workshops with dance students and school children, teenagers with autism, as well as with older dementia patients in a local hospital.
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 and family history poetry films. All the festival screenings under the aegis of the Liberated Words project may be viewed on the website.
  • Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow
Tremlett launched an in 2022 at LYRA Poetry Festival, Bristol entitled Frame to Frames : Your Eyes Follow I. Since the launch at FOTOGENIA in Mexico City she toured the book and screening in 2024.
  • 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.
  • Family History Poetry Project
Tremlett's own ongoing project hosted under to showcase poetry films on the theme of family history.

Critical reception

Publications

  • Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow II / Cuadro a Cuadros: Tus Ojos Siguen II
"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." assistant professor of English, Northern Michigan University.
  • The Poetics of Poetry Film
"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." , 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." , associate professor of digital cinema, Northern Michigan University.

Poetry films

  • some everybodies
"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 video poet.
  • Villanelle for Elizabeth not Ophelia
"It's taking that subject matter , 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." Mary McDonald, poetry filmmaker and educator.
  • Selfie with Marilyn
"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, Norma Jeane and "meta-Marilyn" 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'." Meriel Lland, ecopoet, photographer, nature writer and film poet.
" 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 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." Tom Konyves, video poet 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 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." , poet and fiction writer
  • Patterned Utterance and She, Seasons, Contemplating Nature
"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 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 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!" , polypoet, sound poet, performer, theorist.

Awards and honours

  • Winner of the Maldito Video Poetry Festival prize, Albacete, Spain, 2021 with Selfie with Marilyn, 2020
  • Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts 28 June 2017