The Waste Land trilogy
2012-14
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all works © the artists 2015
photography: lisa peachey and marese mcgrane
The Waste Land Trilogy was a project that sought to re-interpret
TS Eliot's The Waste Land through contemporary eyes. It was, in
line with the poem, an amalgamation of different voices, each intimately echoing a movement within it.
Part I - In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam
The works chosen, while not all created with Eliot in mind, echoed a character or sentiment of the first two movements of the poem
– The Burial of the Dead and A Game of Chess. Their coming together was an attempt to depict the soul of a sometimes
vacant city full of fragile opulence, nervous masses, fading
hope and malignant relationship
Within Eliot’s text, each character – the unctuous but neurotic lady, the women in the pub, the clairvoyant – gave us fragmented yet tangible insights into lives that are both of their time and timeless. Eliot shunts us into direct contact with these aural exchanges. The differences between characters, the way they use language and their class implications further emphasise the still existent diversity of the city and the juxtapositions and overlappings of both these lives and their thematic or symbolic undercurrents.
Staging the exhibition in a residential house, we employed the space to further enhance the idea of the personal: a framework dealing with character and experience in a setting that allowed for an intimate reading.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.
