AT THE VIOLET HOUR
3 February - 11 March 2018
NAYLAND ROCK HOTEL, MARGATE
|
photography by Dik Ng
AT THE VIOLET HOUR
3 February - 11 March 2018
Nayland Rock Hotel, Margate
Open 11.00 - 18.00 Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays
3 February - 11 March 2018
Nayland Rock Hotel, Margate
Open 11.00 - 18.00 Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays
David Buckley | Emma Critchley | Simon Foxall | Dazzling Allgood | Susie Hamilton | Derek Jarman | Paul Knight | Victoria Lucas | Amanda Marchand | Jay Rechsteiner | Lindsay Segall | Shaun Stamp | Katie Surridge | Wolfgang Tillmans | Sally Waterman | Chiara Williams
and 2017 OSE alumni: Chloe Ashley | Emma Gibson | George Harding | Lou Lou Sainsbury | Jessica Jordan-Wrench | Jo Murray | Sara Trillo
Curated by Chiara Williams and Shaun Stamp.
Part of Turner Contemporary's Journeys with 'The Waste Land' programme 3 Feb - 7 May 2018.
In this exhibition, 23 local, national and international artists riff off the ‘inviolable’ voices in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. With a focus on myth, gender and facets of the self, the artists’ work will re-inhabit and re-animate the empty rooms, spaces and grounds of the Grade II listed Nayland Rock Hotel, Margate.
Recalling Eliot’s own convalescence in Margate in 1921, some of the works in this exhibition will be created during short artist residencies held at the hotel, alongside a number of specially commissioned, site-specific works responding directly to the visual lexicon of The Waste Land against the backdrop of the hotel’s heritage; its faded grandeur, peeling wallpaper and artexed surfaces.
It is through an exploration of the myriad voices in The Waste Land, and through the personage of Tiresias in particular, that we choose to navigate the past and possible future of the Nayland Rock Hotel.
To include a programme of events: talks, performances, tours, and workshops.
For further information and press quality images please contact Chiara Williams
[email protected] | T: @chiarawilliams_ | 07519646508
and 2017 OSE alumni: Chloe Ashley | Emma Gibson | George Harding | Lou Lou Sainsbury | Jessica Jordan-Wrench | Jo Murray | Sara Trillo
Curated by Chiara Williams and Shaun Stamp.
Part of Turner Contemporary's Journeys with 'The Waste Land' programme 3 Feb - 7 May 2018.
In this exhibition, 23 local, national and international artists riff off the ‘inviolable’ voices in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. With a focus on myth, gender and facets of the self, the artists’ work will re-inhabit and re-animate the empty rooms, spaces and grounds of the Grade II listed Nayland Rock Hotel, Margate.
Recalling Eliot’s own convalescence in Margate in 1921, some of the works in this exhibition will be created during short artist residencies held at the hotel, alongside a number of specially commissioned, site-specific works responding directly to the visual lexicon of The Waste Land against the backdrop of the hotel’s heritage; its faded grandeur, peeling wallpaper and artexed surfaces.
It is through an exploration of the myriad voices in The Waste Land, and through the personage of Tiresias in particular, that we choose to navigate the past and possible future of the Nayland Rock Hotel.
To include a programme of events: talks, performances, tours, and workshops.
For further information and press quality images please contact Chiara Williams
[email protected] | T: @chiarawilliams_ | 07519646508
| at_the_violet_hour_press_release.pdf |
Chiara Williams
Chiara Williams is a curator and artist with 20 years’ experience working in private and public sectors. She co-founded London-based WW Contemporary Art in 2008, pioneered two UK exhibitions at the 53rd and 54th Venice Biennales, and established the SOLO Award™ in 2012. She has curated and hosted over 70 exhibitions and worked with over 400 artists. Williams grew up between Moscow, London and Venice and currently lives in Margate.
Shaun Stamp
Shaun Stamp is a visual artist born and raised in Wales to a mixed heritage family that spans the equators of South Americas, Europe, Northwest India and West Africa. Stamp has worked across Asia and Europe and been artist in residence with Arts Council Wales, Dutch Arts & Culture Council, Armenian Culture Council, Finnish Arts and Culture Council and has been included in the Morgan Lovell Soho Sculpture Prize and The Broom Hill Sculpture Prize. He currently lives and works between Margate and London.
Chiara Williams is a curator and artist with 20 years’ experience working in private and public sectors. She co-founded London-based WW Contemporary Art in 2008, pioneered two UK exhibitions at the 53rd and 54th Venice Biennales, and established the SOLO Award™ in 2012. She has curated and hosted over 70 exhibitions and worked with over 400 artists. Williams grew up between Moscow, London and Venice and currently lives in Margate.
Shaun Stamp
Shaun Stamp is a visual artist born and raised in Wales to a mixed heritage family that spans the equators of South Americas, Europe, Northwest India and West Africa. Stamp has worked across Asia and Europe and been artist in residence with Arts Council Wales, Dutch Arts & Culture Council, Armenian Culture Council, Finnish Arts and Culture Council and has been included in the Morgan Lovell Soho Sculpture Prize and The Broom Hill Sculpture Prize. He currently lives and works between Margate and London.
reviews
The Times:
Journeys with The Waste Land at Turner Contemporary, Margate Rachel Campbell-Johnston finds poetry in an exhibition based on TS Eliot’s epic Feb 2, 2018 link to online article "An open wooden shelter on the Margate seafront; off-season it can feel like a fairly dismal place. Yet it was to this small timber structure that, in October 1921, a London bank clerk came and, while he sat and stared out over the flat, grey expanse of water, pondered the fragments of a poem that was tumbling about in his head. That bank clerk was TS Eliot, the poem was The Waste Land and its third part, The Fire Sermon, was drafted in Margate...This connection between Eliot and Margate is being celebrated by exhibitions, artists’ projects, performances and events held in venues scattered all over the town. Forget Dreamland — it’s the Waste Land that Margate residents are focusing on this year...The flagship of these cultural celebrations will be Turner Contemporary. If you only have time or inclination for one thing, Journeys with “The Waste Land” is it.... Related events being staged in Margate include the chance to have your tarot read by the Madame Sosostris Society or to take part in a Shantih Shantih Shantih yoga session. For those not feeling too bendy, it’s perhaps better to drop in on the Nayland Rock Hotel. In the clapped-out upper corridors of this soon-to-be-gutted seaview lodging you will find At the Violet Hour, an exhibition in which two dozen mostly young and locally based artists, working in an inventive if not madcap range of media, take over the hotel rooms with works made in response to the poem. This is an advent calendar of a show. As you open each door, you find a mad world in miniature: a black-painted room hung with eerily glowing plant photos by Shaun Stamp; and a space in which all the furniture has been suspended midair above a detritus of seaweed, as Emma Critchley imagines living in a room that floods daily with the tides. Peep through the just-ajar door of a bathroom and you find an artwork reflected in the mirror above a basin. Ponder the relationship between Eliot’s typist and clerk in a series of paintings by Chiara Williams, who co-curates with Stamp. It may not be great art, but it’s varied and vivid. “On Margate Sands./ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing./ The broken finger-nails of dirty hands./ My people humble people who expect/ Nothing”, Eliot wrote. Take this as your guiding principle and you won’t be disappointed. Journeys with “The Waste Land” Turner Contemporary, Margate, Kent (01843 233000), February 3 to May 7. At the Violet Hour, Nayland Rock Hotel (chiarawilliams.com), February 3 to March 11" 
The Telegraph:
T.S. Eliot returns to Margate through Journeys with 'The Waste Land' and Violet Hour exhibitions by Louisa Buck 8 FEBRUARY 2018 • 10:25AM link to online article In the late Autumn of 1921, the bank clerk poet T.S. Eliot came to Margate on doctor’s orders to convalesce. He arrived in a fragile state both physically and mentally, and took a tram to sit in a Victorian Nayland Rock shelter on the seafront every day. It was here, looking out at the expanse of grey water, watching children playing and war veterans exercising on the beach, that he drafted part of The Waste Land. “On Margate Sands/ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing/” he wrote, giving the town a bleak namecheck in what many consider to be the greatest poem of the 20th century. Now Margate is celebrating its association with Eliot and his fractured modernist masterpiece with artist’s projects, exhibitions and events taking place throughout the town... ...Back outside on Margate’s seafront and further along from the open sided shelter where Eliot pondered The Waste Land, is the Nayland Rock hotel, a down at heel Victorian pile which in its heyday was visited by Charlie Chaplin and Mick Jagger but more recently was a hostel for asylum seekers. Now poised for redevelopment, it hosts At the Violet Hour, another Waste Land-themed show in which 24 artists have removed the dead pigeons from the dilapidated rooms and re inhabited them with works inspired by the poem. What this offers is an intensely kaleidoscopic experience; each door opens into a dramatically different environment. Susie Hamilton pays direct tribute to Eliot with her pinned-up abundance of fluid, vividly painted images from The Waste Land – from scuttling rats to loveless couplings and guttering candles - which cover the walls of an attic garret and have even been painted directly on the door. Emma Critchely is more oblique as she considers the devastation of climate change in a room where tip-tilted, seaweed-draped furniture is suspended above a grimy tideline as if regularly flooded by rising sea levels outside. Some of the poem’s more sumptuous passages come to mind for the magnificently deranged diva shimmering in a green sequined dress who flings herself around the hotel’s deserted ballroom in a film by Simon Foxall. Jessica Jordan-Wrench has requisitioned the hotel’s phone booth where an old fashioned Bakelite phone is ringing. Pick it up and out spill the imagined intimate thoughts of the Typist, one of The Waste Land’s key female figures, which have been created from spliced-together movie clips. Down the corridor the late Derek Jarman’s darkly poetic lament The Last of England, a film infused with the words and imagery of Eliot, is playing before a rumpled, recently vacated bed. It is testament to this extraordinary poem that across Margate Sands and beyond, in the work of artists dead and living, historical and contemporary, Eliot’s “nothing on nothing” continues to reverberate with enduring force. Journeys with The Wasteland: Turner Contemporary until 7 May; turnercontemporary.org. At the Violet Hour, Nayland Rock Hotel until 11 March; chiarawilliams.com. 
The Isle of Thanet News:
At The Violet Hour exhibition in Nayland Rock attracts hundreds of visitors in first opening days February 19, 2018 Kathy Bailes link to online article An exhibition at the Nayland Rock Hotel inspired by modernist poet TS Eliot has attracted more than 1200 visitors in its first five days. At The Violet Hour, curated by Chiara Williams and Shaun Stamp, is part of the Journeys with The Waste Land programme which comprises a major exhibition at Turner Contemporaryand 30 separate displays and events throughout Margate. Some 23 local, national and international artists focus on myth, gender and facets of the self for At The Violet Hour within the rooms, spaces and grounds of the Grade II listed Nayland Rock Hotel. Recalling Eliot’s own convalescence in Margate in 1921, some of the works in the exhibition are being created during short artist residencies held at the hotel, alongside a number of specially commissioned, site-specific works responding directly to TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land against the backdrop of the hotel’s heritage; its faded grandeur, peeling wallpaper and artexed surfaces. The exhibition includes a programme of events: talks, performances, tours, and workshops and runs until March 11. Opening times are 11am to 6pm Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. 
a-n The Artists Information Company:
Why artists move: a guide to relocating 27 February 2018 Dan Thompson link to online article Article excerpt: "Feeling quite London-jaded and with a two-year-old child, Williams wasn’t planning on getting very much involved in the local scene, “but the friendliness of Margate gave me a new enthusiasm for working with people… and I became genuinely interested in meeting really good local artists.” Williams started peer review salon Dry Run in Margate in February 2017, and co-curated her first exhibition in the town, ‘At The Violet Hour’, in February 2018, taking over rooms in a largely derelict hotel...“The people here gave me personally a new lease of life,” Williams explains. “The challenges have been about getting healthier, (mentally and physically), looking after myself, and giving myself time to create my own work – although it still can be really hard to carve the time out to paint.”...read full article |
Art Aesthetics Magazine:
At the Violet Hour: Reanimating T.S. Eliot's 'Inviolable Voices' CALUM COCKBURN Feb 5, 2018 link to online article On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing. / The broken fingernails of dirty hands. / My people humble people who expect / Nothing. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Fire Sermon’. At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives / Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, / The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights / Her stove, and lays out food in tins. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Fire Sermon'. "October 1921. The British poet T. S. Eliot travelled down to Margate to recuperate after suffering a nervous breakdown, buckling under the weight of his failing marriage and the pressure of completing The Waste Land (1922). He’s thought to have drafted ‘The Fire Sermon’, the third section of this work – which would come to represent one of the defining poetic compositions of the Modernist era – in a Victorian seaside shelter, an open timber structure that still stands today, overlooking Nayland Rock. Nearly a century later, Chiara Williams and Shaun Stamp's exhibition has opened in the Nayland Rock Hotel. At the Violet Hour brings together nationally and internationally known artists who are inspired by the poem and the ‘inviolable voices’ that invest its text, the myriad faces, the stories, and the ‘heap of broken images’ that emerge from Eliot’s ‘unreal city’. The Nayland Rock Hotel provides a stunning backdrop to the exhibition’s installations. Its heritage is undeniable. Built in 1886, it was once one the grandest holiday destinations on the south coast, the toast of tourists and stars alike. Regency wallpaper decorated its corridors, stairways, and bedrooms. Wrought-iron railings lined its balconies. Guests strolled leisurely through the landscaped gardens, before settling in ornate dining rooms and lounges. Here, they enjoyed unrivalled views of the whole of Margate, the coast, and the Channel. In the present, however, this grandeur has faded, the hotel that Eliot would have known from that brief sojourn almost unrecognisable. The sea and the coastline remain but the gardens have gone, sold off to developers years ago. Two of the hotel’s upper floors were destroyed by a fire in the 80s, never to be rebuilt. The wallpaper is now discoloured, peeling to reveal dirty chipboard; the walls themselves are damp and mildewed; the window and mirror panes cracked and stained, the frames browned, some boarded up. In the last decade, it was used to house newly arrived refugees. Recently, it has been sold to new owners, presumably to be refurbished completely thus effectively erasing the last of the hotel’s heritage and history. There’s an unsettling disquiet to this place. Every room of the hotel teems with forgotten voices, a whispering that accompanies the smack of the surf, the sea and rain-flecked wind outside. This is a space that appears suspended in time, and a setting that, in its decayed and crumbling state, inevitably recalls the long-forgotten ‘memory and desire’ that begins The Waste Land, emerging from the dead world of modern society. Thus, At the Violet Hourfinds its perfect home here, a liminal space where the voices of Eliot’s poem and the past can find new articulation and definition in the paintings, sculpture, and installations that both inhabit and reanimate the hotel’s numbered rooms across its four floors. The pieces focus on a few select themes that dominate ‘The Fire Sermon’, especially: the power of myth; the nature of gender; the construction of the self; sex, and sexual violence, all linked to some extent through the figure of the blind yet all-seeing prophet Tiresias. Susie Hamilton emphasises this figure, seeking to convey the chaotic and fragmentary nature of the poem and Tiresias’s own omniscience in her work on paper in ‘These fragments’: drawings and paintings from ‘The Waste Land’. Broad brush strokes, swathes of colour, chiaroscuro and indistinct, often grotesque figures are all features of these pieces, as she depicts characters and scenes from the whole of The Waste Land, out of time and sequence, an attempt to reflect, perhaps, the prophet’s own disordered perspective on the world. Many of the exhibition’s installations are dependent on the participation of their audiences. Jessica Jordan-Wrench’s phonebooth, for example, places the viewer in an intimate call with one of The Waste Land’s major female characters: The Typist. The viewer must enter the phonebooth alone, pick up the ringing handset, before listening to the Typist’s looped monologue, words filled with all the sadness, infatuation, and despair of Eliot’s text, but pieced together from clippings from films over the past twenty years. She speaks to us in words and a voice that are not her own. Similarly, Lindsay Segall’s Fight in Room 421 is a film that details an emotional, anger-filled encounter between two lovers in the middle of an affair, an encounter highly reminiscent of the Typist’s.. The scene is violent; the man attempts to force himself upon the woman. Wine glasses are smashed, thrown at the walls, and the glass fragments remain in the room for the viewer to see, lining the cupboards, bed, and floors identical to those on the screen. The effect is disturbing. It’s as if the onlooker is forced to rediscover their own repressed memory; like Tiresias, we’re made to witness and thus relive the encounter ourselves, as it happens around us in real time. The sexual abuse of women is also the subject of Victoria Lucas’s Conversing with Tiresias. Here, the artist herself takes on the role of prophetic clairvoyant, reading out a script that hints at the events that have taken place in Room 418. The piece intersperses quotations from Eliot’s ‘Fire Sermon’, in which the blind prophet watches the rape of the Typist but does nothing, with historic accounts of sexual assault made against the film producer Harvey Weinstein. The similarities between the two are striking. At times, it is hard to distinguish them. There’s even a plant pot in the corner, whose appearance needs no explanation in light of the stories from Weinstein’s accusers. In the exhibition’s opening space, Katie Louise Surridge reinterprets the metamorphosis of Philomel, who, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is raped and silenced by having her tongue cut out, before finally fleeing to safety by transforming into a bird. Here, Philomel’s wings are steel-forged, hardened, made from hundreds of hand-crafted acanthus leaf decorations and then welded together. Surridge gives Philomel a far greater agency than Ovid or Eliot did; she becomes the means of her own escape, her wings her own invention, much like that of Daedalus. Shaun Stamp takes the central motif of the ‘lilacs’ rising out of The Waste Land as the inspiration for his work. In one bathroom, a diptych of glow-in-the-dark lilac flowers sit behind a dirty shower curtain, while up above, on a railing, a nightingale surprises the viewer, gazing at the flowers on the wall, highlighting the contrast between the natural and its unnatural surroundings. Meanwhile, Emma Critchley’s Do You Know Nothing? Do You See Nothing? Do You Remember, Nothing? seeks to reflect the disordered perception of time in the poem, conflating future and present, transforming her room into a space that floods at high tide, the residue of this sea water visibly staining its walls. The room, and by extension the hotel itself, becomes a prophetic vision of the effect of climate change, and the effect of rising sea levels. The exhibition presents so many interesting new perspectives and interpretations on Eliot’s poem and modern life across its four floors: Paul Knight’s meditation on Nietzsche’s ‘Eternal Reoccurrence’ and the connection of melancholia to remembered experience in Room 316; Chiara Williams’ Hush, which interrogates the cinematic framing of women’s bodies, and Emma Critchley’s We Do Not Know What We Cannot Name, which explores how language shapes the way we perceive and connect with the world are all particular highlights. There are even two rooms on different floors devoted to the film-maker Derek Jarman and his debt to Eliot’s poem, with items including Jarman’s own copy of the The Waste Land loaned from the Derek Jarman estate. At the Violet Hour’s success lies in its use of such a unique space, the decaying, crumbling Nayland Rock Hotel. It creates an environment in which the viewer truly experiences something of the uncanny, ‘inviolable voices’ of Eliot’s Waste Land. Where they emerge, half-whispered, articulating themselves like so many echoes through desolate and half-empty rooms. At the Violet Hour is on show from 3 February - 11 March, 2018, at the Nayland Rock Hotel, Margate. Curators: Chiara Williams and Shaun Stamp. 
The i Paper:
Doing up the Dream: Margate is a town buzzing with raw energy by Ben Alden-Falconer link to online article Much like east London before it, Margate is now grappling with a rapid transformation. The Turner Contemporary art gallery, a state-led initiative, prompted the first wave of change, leaving the Old Town full of chic boutique shops. Now another phase is under way. Tracey Emin is set to return to her home town and make a beautiful but derelict old factory her new studio, while The Libertines have announced plans to open a hotel-cum-recording studio called The Albion Rooms. As I spend every weekend down at the house renovating, I am also trying to discover more of what is going on in the town. After all, by the time the winter evenings arrive I am often just too physically exhausted to continue building work. The more I see of Margate, the more convinced I am that the creative energy that is being pushed out of London by spiralling prices is finding a new home here among the waves, horizon and fresh air. It has the kind of raw energy that I imagine existed in parts of London or Manchester in the 1980s... ...The visual arts, too, are blossoming here and are not confined to the Turner Gallery’s current exhibition, inspired by TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (Part 3 was written here). The project has expanded, with more radical wasteland-like installations taking over the shabby Nayland Rock Hotel on the seafront. A collection of artists, printmakers and galleries is also finding a home in The Depository, a Victorian warehouse in Cliftonville. I stumble on Open School East’s annual exhibition, which has filled some of the double-height spaces with sculpture and video art. I can’t help seeing the parallels with Chelsea in New York, before the warehouses were turned from artist’s studios into luxury flats or hotels... Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/homes-and-gardens/doing-up-the-dream-margate-energy-culture/ |
|
|
|