- Venue
- Lombard Street Gallery
- Starts
- Saturday, February 3, 2018
- Ends
- Sunday, February 25, 2018
- Address
- 2 Lombard Street Margate Kent CT9 1EJ
- Location
- South East England
Five Isle of Thanet artists showcase new work inspired by an event that happened over 100 years ago as they travel From Wasteland to Wasteland, exploring and connecting WW1, Margate and T S Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’.
On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1916, Captain James Young of the 179th Tunnelling Company, Royal Engineers, detonated two explosive charges in tunnels dug through chalk from the British trenches to a position under the German front line.
The resulting explosion created a single, vast, smooth sided, flat bottomed crater measuring nearly 100 metres across and 21 metres deep. Now known as the
Lochnagar Crater, it is the largest crater ever made by man in anger, and is now a site dedicated to peace, fellowship and reconciliation.
Five years later, after suffering a nervous breakdown, TS Eliot travelled to Margate to rest. Sitting in a seafront shelter, and inspired in part by the horror of the First World War, he wrote his epic poem The Waste Land.
This exhibition is part of an ongoing project by this collective of five artists, who have been given unique access to the Crater site to inspire their work.
From Wasteland to Wasteland forms part of Turner Contemporary’s local programme of events supporting their exhibition Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’
