Wednesday 9 December 2015

Research feedback




40 members of the Research Forum gathered to share initial ideas for the 2018 exhibition and talk about emerging themes. Everyone brought along one artwork to discuss and suggestions encompassed artworks, documents and artefacts spanning from 1650 to 2014. To give a flavour of the richness of ideas here's an extract form one of the conversations that occurred:




Dani: I love things that are like diagrams and maps. We were talking in our group about being able to read things in many different ways… and a clash between reading something logically and illogically, or logical structures and a lack of. This image suggests the idea of paths and structures but you can’t really work out what it is, so you’ve got all this structure but you’re none the wiser. I also find it beautiful as I love diagrams.

Franca: I can tell you what this is: These are pictures of quantum particles taken in a high energy accelerator which is a machine which makes particles spin so fast they’re made visible. So this is basically the smallest, tiniest piece of matter, which we’re all made of. I picked this because I work as a translator in a committee about the history of quantum physics which developed exactly during these years [the years that Eliot was writing ‘The Waste Land’.] Maybe because I’m used to thinking about these things I really feel the quantum poetry. It’s really beyond time and space (which is why I chose the theme ’time’). It also has to do with why I’m here, personally. When I was picking a new place in England to move to a few months ago, and I read the line ‘On Margate Sands I can connect nothing with nothing’ this was exactly what I needed to do right then. I thought ‘wow this is a good sign’. This is also why I chose to be in this group. I also see that most words in the room have to do either with space and time, also mental illness, fragmentation or disjunction have to do with being out of alignment with space and time.

Mike: It makes me think there’s a wonderful possibility of putting this with the Man Ray ‘Dust Breeding’ image. There’s the extraordinary way in which this loops into Eliot, in his early life, attending Bergson’s lectures in Paris, and that was a really fundamental influence on him in terms of shaping his ideas about the world. So there are lots of fantastic connections developing. 

Image credits: 1 - Trish Scott 
2&3 - http://teachers.web.cern.ch/teachers/archiv/HST2005/bubble_chambers/BCWebsite/index.htm

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