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This multi-channel video installation from internationally-acclaimed photographer Emily Andersen, explores the work and life of Ruth Fainlight (b.1931) – an American-born poet and writer.

Ruth’s intensely visual poetry and fiction touch on themes of psychological and domestic situations, time, memory and loss. Born in New York City in 1931, she moved to England when she was 15. In 1959 she married the writer, Alan Sillitoe, and her many literary friendships included Sylvia Plath, Jane and Paul Bowles, and Robert Graves.

Andersen’s work is an intimate portrait of Fainlight, now aged 91, presenting fragments of the poet’s life. Taking inspiration from Renaissance triptychs and their depiction of different elements of the same subject across three panels, Somewhere Else Entirely captures the poet and writer at her home in London, making notes, on her walks, and in the seaside town of Brighton where she spent her teenage years.

In Somewhere Else Entirely Fainlight talks off-screen, revealing fascinating insights into her life, her creative process, and how she is ‘in the hands of the poem’. In her voiceover, she movingly recites her poem ‘Somewhere Else Entirely’ composed after the death of her husband.

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