Ian Hamilton Finlay concrete in an ART form | BLF 2026

A double bill pairing a screening of The Boat in the Writing Room (2025) with a live word-and-music performance, Finlay – Jandl – Satie, by pianist and spoken-word artist Florian Kaplick.

The Boat in the Writing Room is a film about a near-forgotten period in the early career of the Scottish poet, artist and gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay. In particular, it evokes the year that he and his partner Sue spent at Gledfield in the Eastern Highlands, 1965–66, site of their primordial garden and location of his lost first three-dimensional poems.

Finlay – Jandl – Satie explores links between Finlay, Austrian avant-garde poet Ernst Jandl, and the music of Erik Satie. Jandl, a star performer at the June 1965 International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall, had been the Finlays' first visitor at Gledfield the previous month. The close literary friendship that he and IHF maintained for several years forms a major element of Kaplick's innovative performance.

The film is written and presented by Alistair Peebles, early biographer of Finlay, and directed by Michael Lloyd of flytingfilms. Florian Kaplick (Scotland/Germany) is an acclaimed musician and word performance artist whose practice oscillates at the intersection of sound and language.