Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’

Mike Tooby writes about the background to a new exhibition in Margate

by Mike Tooby 23rd February 2018

‘Journeys with “The Waste Land”’ an exhibition I initiated as a curator, has recently opened at the Turner Contemporary art gallery in Margate. After six years of planning, it has so far been well attended and received, though inevitably some negative reaction has also come our way. Its starting point is that T S Eliot spent a few weeks in Margate in the autumn of 1921, where he wrote significant elements of his great poem, published in 1922.

The method by which the exhibition was created has influenced the reaction to it. Rather than reach out to a local audience as the show approached, we instead involved members of that audience from the outset, offering an open opportunity to curate the exhibition itself – some are bewildered by this approach, others celebrate it.

What became known as the ‘research group’ – around forty to sixty people at any one time – shared ideas, proposals, reactions and concerns. Key themes emerged, driven by our awareness of the relevance of the poem to contemporary issues: T S Eliot’s personal crisis and mental health, and the poem’s imagery of fragmentation; the legacy of conflict, the consciousness of displacement; the voices of women; a landscape where ‘the dead tree gives no shelter’; the search for faith and meaning in the material world; and the role of myths and archetypes. These drove selections of works, juxtapositions and interpretation. We hope our many and diverse voices help audiences find something that speaks to them.

Over the project I often found myself thinking of Quaker business method. In many years of attending Meetings for Worship for Business and meetings conducted in the Quaker way, experiences and examples have offered themselves to my wider working life. I found these particularly valuable in my own journey in this project.

Throughout, I found this approach offering good ways to proceed – waiting for ‘a sense of the meeting’ to emerge; listening and sharing ideas to shape that sense; the practice of forming a concluding statement through which we could test our agreement – or to decide to put a discussion aside for further reflection.

I also found setting a long-term and specific purpose important in bringing together such a diverse group with very different personal situations. People understood why their commitment needed to be sustained: we weren’t simply meeting to enjoy each others’ company (though we did). We asked how visitors to the exhibition would understand it as both personal and collective testimony.

We often debated the well-known passage in the poem: ‘On Margate Sands./ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing.’ The familiar sense is of it being a note of despair. However, instead, we often felt it also said: we can restart, we can connect, even between ‘nothing’ – a blank slate – and ‘nothing’ – a moment of still, centred energy.

Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ continues at Turner Contemporary, Margate until 7 May; a revised version is at The Herbert Art Gellery , Coventry, 15 September-18 November.

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