Group Show

Hi everyone. Thanks for being involved in this project. You are (in alphabetical order):

Aline von der Assen
Amanda Couch
Anna Chapman
Carolyn Flood
Chris Shaw
Claudia Carr
James Cahill

James has just got involved I am very pleased to announce. He will write our press release/accompanying essay.

I am hoping we can all meet very soon at Blyth. I am aware Aline and Anna do not live in London but Aline is due to pay the capital a visit early January, so perhaps then?

When Mindy asked me to curate an exhibition at Blyth, my immediate reaction was that it was an impossible task. I thought this because it is enough of a trauma trying to organise my own thoughts and ideas into presentable artworks without having to consider others. The only way I was going to agree to it was if I could build it around dissonance and even failure, albeit an artful and self-conscious failure. I have asked each of you to be in it because I saw something skewed, knotty, broken, veiled in your work - as well as unity and cohesion.

Linking our works' shards, fragments, glimpses up with the poem seemed logical. The poem is at once unified and broken. It has certainly struck a chord although its exact meaning is up for debate. Its mysterious Holy Grail-like quality is deeply appealing to me. Embodying elements of romantic, especially Grail, literature it seems painfully conscious that us 'moderns' have entered a new era of a crisis of faith. We're bewildered, lost among the 'stony rubbish'. Everything is dry and barren in the waste land. Its sense of mystery is perhaps ironic as it leaves us under no illusion of the shallowness of modern living. Sex is mechanical. Faith is put in tarot cards. It's bleak - there is no mystery anymore, although part 5 seems to suggest a rumbling of hope, the coming of rain. It's been like this before, Eliot seems to say - life goes in cycles and we just happen to be alive in a period of lack. You don't need to uncover the poem's secrets line by line but some understanding of the context it was written in might help (English language poetry written in the decades before The Waste Land had slipped into nostalgia and sentimentality for the most part and was no longer suitable for a world ravaged by world war) aswell as a knowledge of its formal layout (some argue the clue to its content is all in its form. Form which echoes the frenzied pace of modernity - I personally don't believe in the separation between form and content) will be very helpful in sharpening your focus on what's important for this project. Knowing your work, having seen it, I think we all have an intrinsic feel for what this poem is about. The bottom line is Eliot splices voices: everyday speech sits next to biblical references; the coarse and the throwaway bleeds seamlessly and also jarringly into language of extraordinary and concentrated richness. It could be argued we're still fundamentally in Eliot's epoch, so let's remind people of this revolutionary poem.

To me there is something vulgar about a group show that doesn't, in some way, acknowledge the difficulty of putting on a group show. As I see it: an artist is one entity but even the artist him/herself cannot know everything about him/herself or about his/her practice. A curator comes along and sees even less of what the artist sees in his/her work. Perhaps the curator sees something entirely different but equally valid. Throwing that artist in the mix with other artists and inviting visitors to draw parallels between the artists dilutes and distorts the artist's initial vision even further. Therein lies the problem but also the beauty of the group show.

Thanks for being involved. I hope you'll get something out of it.