‘Mixing Memory and Desire’
The Pie Factory, Margate
April 6th to 11th 2018
Making work in response to T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land (1922), so full of imagery and ideas, was a stimulating prospect. I found that my approach altered, to allow myself to be influenced by the poem, rather than to focus on particular aspects of it. Eventually I decided to use collage, or a mixture of collage and drawing, to reflect on the its fragmentary style of The Waste Land.
T.S. Eliot, writing about Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) in a letter from 1921 states that “In art there should be interpenetration and metamorphosis,” he is referring to the effect of interweaving elements from the past and the present within the ballet. Collage seemed to be the best way for me to achieve this requirement.
Eliot borrowed lines from many others including Shakespeare, Dante and the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, so I have also borrowed widely, and more humbly perhaps, from sources as diverse as the Oxford Historian Magazine and a Fired Earth catalogue.
In his notes on The Waste Land Eliot mentions that it is Tiresias, (the blind prophet of Apollo who spent 7 years as a woman) who binds the sections of the poem together; though blind, Tiresias ‘sees’ the future. In my images I hope to combine some seemingly incompatible images into a compatible whole, messages from the past influencing visions of the present and possibly the future. Tiresias appears in different guises in several of my pieces.