T.S. Eliot’s exhibition -Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ opens this Saturday at Turner Contemporary

“On Margate Sands.

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.”

(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land)

Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ is a major exhibition exploring the significance of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land through the visual arts.

In 1921, T.S. Eliot spent a few weeks in Margate at a crucial moment in his career. He arrived in a fragile state, physically and mentally, and worked on The Waste Land sitting in the Nayland Rock shelter on Margate Sands. The poem was published the following year, and proved to be a pivotal and influential modernist work, reflecting on the fractured world in the aftermath of the First World War as well as Eliot’s own personal crisis.

If Not, Not (1975-6), R.B. Kitaj, National Galleries of Scotland

Presenting over 60 artists, and almost 100 objects, the exhibition includes works by Fiona Banner, Cecil Collins, Tacita Dean, Elisabeth Frink, Patrick Heron, Edward Hopper, Barbara Kruger, Helen Marten, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Paula Rego, John Smith and JMW Turner. The exhibition explores how contemporary and historical art can enable us to reflect on the poem’s shifting flow of diverse voices, references, characters and places.

The exhibition is the culmination of a three year project designed to develop a pioneering approach to curating. Local residents, coming together as the Waste land Research Group, have developed the entire exhibition. Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ is consequently the result of many months the group have spent discussing personal connections between art, poetry and life.

                    Lines Made by Walking, Carey Young, 2003 – Image © Carey Young

The Waste Land Research Group

The Waste Land Research Group formed through an open call issued by Turner Contemporary in 2015. Ranging from people in their 20s to their 70s, the group have brought a diverse range of interests and life experiences to bear on Eliot’s poem. Through weekly meetings, discussions, talks, workshops, walks, research trips, studio visits and individual inquiry, the group have developed their own methods for making decisions together and deciding on content.

All the artworks in the exhibition have been chosen by group members. They have also designed the layout of the show, written the exhibition texts, and devised the public programme.

The exhibition foregrounds the multiple perspectives of those involved. In doing so, it mirrors the form of the poem, where Eliot juxtaposes many different voices and references.

‘Portrait of Space, Al Bulwayeb, near Siwa, Egypt 1937’ by Lee Miller

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