Photographic Response to the Journeys with Wasteland Exhibition at Turner Contemporary.

Turner Contemporary's new exhibition has taken TS Eliot's poem The Wasteland as it's theme.

Eliot stayed in Margate in 1921 convalescing after the first world war and the beach shelter at Nayland Rock is where he worked and wrote some of his poem The Wasteland.

This poem proved to be a pivotal work, moving poetry into a new modernist direction, with the fractured form, reflecting something of the aftermath of the war on body and mind.

It's not one of my favourite poems,  some of the imagery is powerful though and provoking.

I have taken the shelter at Nayland rock as my subject, exploring it in photography and with digital processes. These are the first images.

The Wateland and Altered images

 

We are working on a project looking at TS Eliot's The Wasteland in Blank Canvas.  A poem, part of which was written in Margate, with Eliot sitting in the shelter at Nayland Rock, near the station.

The poem is rich in symbols, imagery and references, as far as I can tell, to much classical, literary, religious and secular thought.

The Wasteland would not be a choice of reading for me, but as an exploration in visual terms, I do find it interesting.

I've not tried to make any art using poems as inspiration before, so this is a new way of working.

Here are some altered images, working with ink on found images of land and seascapes and on paper.
I will continue altering some of my own images next time.