Kentish Express Ashford & District - What's On
What’s so special?
Journeys with The Waste Land 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.
Key was getting to know the poem, and discussing between them personal connections between art, poetry and life. But what is so special about The Waste Land? Eliot’s masterpiece is a long, complex poem about the psychological and cultural crisis that came with the loss of moral and cultural identity after the First World War. When it was first published in 1922, it was considered radically experimental.
One of the exhibition’s researchers, Judy Dermott, said: “The splintering of language and of sound and of vision – initially so bizarre – has become so mainstream, so seminal, we no longer perceive it as being anything but normal. But remember that every time you send a text message, use Twitter or Snapchat, listen to grime or rap or hip hop, use collage in either literary or artistic form, every time you watch a film using montage, flashback, you are working and perceiving in direct descent from the modernists. And that part of this revolution occurred here, in Margate.”
Fellow researcher Trish Scott, said: “I don’t see this exhibition as being about poetry or art history. Many of the artworks have been chosen for very personal reasons, and, for me, that’s what constitutes the unique richness of this show. It’s about how we – in all our different ways – connect to ideas, as much as what those connections actually are.”