Misery – TRT 2:38
Video: Marie Craven (Australia)
Visual Art: Sarah Sloat (USA/Germany)
Writers: Sarah Sloat & Marie Craven
Sarah Sloat creates visual art that is also poetry. She does this by using various techniques to ‘erase’ most of the words from pages of Stephen King’s novel, Misery. Her ‘erasures’ leave only scattered words around the page, forming small poems. To these, she adds ‘found images’, related to the poems in freely associative ways. The Misery video combines a number of Sarah’s visual poetry pieces, and animates them for the screen. This gives rise to a fragmented narrative, or new poem, from the juxtaposition of the selected pieces. The video focuses strongly on the image components of Sarah’s Misery pages, and creates a new form for them. Rather than a simple presentation of Sarah’s visual poetry, the video is an audio-visual response to the inspiration of them.
MARIE CRAVEN is a film-maker in Queensland, Australia, who has been making short films for 35 years. Her films have exhibited extensively at international festivals and events, and gathered many awards. Over the decades, she has been a sessional teacher and independent assessor at universities, a reviewer of films and books, an arts administrator, festival judge and programmer. As of mid-2019, she is co-editor of Moving Poems, the world’s major website for video poetry. In December 2019 she will be featured artist at the Athens International Video Poetry Festival in Greece.
SARAH SLOAT was born in the sixties in New Jersey, USA. She spent her early years as a sinophile, reading Pearl S. Buck books and Chinese poetry and watching David Carradine do Kung Fu. Sarah has worked as a NOW canvasser, a dog sitter, English teacher, temporary secretary, reader for the blind, professor and reporter. She now divides her time between Germany and Spain, where she works in news. A book of her visual poetry will be published next year by Sarabande books.
17 Days Video Series 