London/Margate Fine Art Trip 2018

I created my own itinerary for this trip, shown below, this blog is written around the itinerary I had created. See MW_Itinerary

Monday 5th February 2018

Turner Contemporary Gallery (Travel: Rhyl/Euston/St Pancras/Margate)

• Dissertation Research – to take photographs for the website
  https://www.turnercontemporary.org/

The following photographs were taken to assist with my website and model preparation for the Dissertation Dissertation module.

Whilst at Turner Contemporary, I  also visited the following exhibitions.

Journeys with the Waste Land

Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ is a major exhibition exploring the significance of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land through the visual arts.

In 1921, T.S. Eliot spent a few weeks in Margate at a crucial moment in his career. He arrived in a fragile state, physically and mentally, and worked on The Waste Land sitting in the Nayland Rock shelter on Margate Sands. The poem was published the following year, and proved to be a pivotal and influential modernist work, reflecting on the fractured world in the aftermath of the First World War as well as Eliot’s own personal crisis.

Presenting over 60 artists, and almost 100 objects, the exhibition includes works by Fiona Banner, Cecil Collins, Tacita Dean, Elisabeth Frink, Patrick Heron, Edward Hopper, Barbara Kruger, Helen Marten, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Paula Rego, John Smith and JMW Turner. The exhibition explores how contemporary and historical art can enable us to reflect on the poem’s shifting flow of diverse voices, references, characters and places.

The exhibition 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. Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ is consequently the result of many months the group have spent discussing personal connections between art, poetry and life.

https://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/journeys-with-the-waste-land

Another Time

At first glimpse this installation really makes you think that it is someone in the sea. unfortunately both times I visited, the tide was in, so I couldn’t get close to the sculpture.

“The history of western sculpture has been concerned with movement. I wish to celebrate the still and silent nature of sculpture. The work is designed to be placed within the flow of lived time.” – Antony Gormley

JUST ANNOUNCED: Turner Contemporary is thrilled to confirm that the Antony Gormley sculpture ANOTHER TIME will be staying in Margate for another year. The cast iron statue that was installed on Fulsam Rock beside Turner Contemporary this summer has been granted an extension and will remain in situ until November 2018.

ANOTHER TIME is a series of one hundred, solid cast-iron figures by Antony Gormley who is known for his sculptures and installations that explore the experience of being human, of inhabiting a human body.

https://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/another-time-for-margate-folkestone

Dutch/Light (for Agenta Block)

Chatham Historic Dockyard Trust and Turner Contemporary have commissioned artist Jyll Bradley to make a new piece of work for summer 2017. Dutch/Light (for Agneta Block) marks the 350^th anniversary of the Dutch Raid on the River Medway, which brought about the end of the Anglo-Dutch wars, peace between the two nations and an unlikely cultural exchange based on growing plants.

At the time of the Dutch Raid, Dutch growers were pioneering early glasshouse technology, which started with the simple idea of leaning glass frames against a south-facing wall – the so-called ‘Dutch Light’ – which led to a horticultural revolution that crossed the North Sea.

“I call the work Dutch/Light (for Agneta Block) because the first person to ripen a pineapple in Europe was Agneta Block, a Dutch horticulturalist and art collector. Pineapple growing using the ‘Dutch Light’ and southerly wall system was the focus of early Anglo-Dutch horticultural exchange. I feel the story of the Dutch raid is very male; a fascinating by-product of it is a woman growing a pineapple – and our love of glasshouses today.” Jyll Bradley

In the work, five tall ‘Dutch Lights’ are turned on their side and leant against south-facing walls to create an open structure that is activated by the sun, and under which audiences can walk and sit while bathed in geometric colour.

https://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/dutch-light-for-agneta-block