Lawrence Upton

Lawrence Upton (born London, of Cornish, Scillonian and Irish origins) is a poet, graphic artist and sound artist. He is a solo and collaborative writer, maker and performer.

He was first known as a poet, but early made text-sound composition, including stints at Fylkingen in Stockholm and West Square Studio in London.

He was a founder member of jgjgjg, Bang Crash Wallop and other performance groupings. More recently, he has worked with The Debris Band.

Since just before the turn of this century, he has been making multi-media pieces involving dance, film and electro-acoustic music, particularly now with John Levack Drever. He is also working collaboratively with Wilton Azevedo (DV film), Tina Bass (voice), Guy Begbie (bookworks), Benedict Taylor (voice as a musical instrument0 and Richard Tipping (graphics and DV film). These collaborations take the form of long term creative research projects.

In 1981, Upton had a substantial exhibition under the title Deteriorating Texts at LYC in Cumbria.

Since then, and until recently, much of his graphic output had been for book publication and performance projections; but he has an exhibition in Bristol in Autumn 2011 of collaborative bookworks with Guy Begbie, following the exhibition of individual works in Scotland (Scottish Poetry Library) and USA (Center for the Arts, Buffalo).

His recent publications include a song and a film (Veer, 2009), Wire Sculptures (Reality Street, 2003) and, with Bob Cobbing, Collaborations for Peter Finch (Writers Forum, 1997, 2010). He co-edited Word Score Utterance Choreography (Writers Forum, 1998), with Cobbing, with whom he made the 300 section graphical poem Domestic Ambient Noise (Writers Forum, 2000). Upton now directs Writers Forum. (wfuk.org.uk)

Other titles have appeared as limited editions from the Canadian presses housepress and no press.

Upton has taught at Secondary schools (rising to Head of Media Studies), F.E. (Head of Academic Computing) and H.E. He has just completed a three year engagement as Creative Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London.

He maintains an interest in working with students of all ages and welcomes opportunities to do more in that line.