The WavEs: A Project

The text is created from 3D scans of Virginia Woolf’s writing hut and garden located in the house where she lived from 1918 until her death in 1941: Monk’s House in Rodmell, East Sussex. The scans capture the garden in ways that appear both substantial and yet ethereal, tracing contours that explore the physical textures of the site while using movement to allude to the cadences and syntax of the text. The film has been developed using Woolf’s 1931 experimental novel ‘The Waves’ as a narrative armature. The ‘camera’ moves through the garden, mapping out different perspectives with a steady pace and rhythm, tracing dreamlike vectors as if motivated by the desire-lines of Woolf’s restless characters. After a sequence that implies confusion and disorientation, the final tracking shot returns us to the hut, as a voice previously buried and scrambled in the soundtrack reads a particularly poignant section of the novel.