At the Violet Hour

Abstract

My proposed residency project begins with Margate as a place for leisure, escapism and utopian dreaming. Referencing Eliot’s own convalescence in Margate in 1921, this coastal town is a site positioned against the drudgery of the everyday - an interruption in the flow and misery of working life in the city and the associated cultural constructs that frame human existence in the modern era. Here one is free to relocate the self, which is a rare circumstance that can be likened to the favourable position of the artist or poet, as one enters somewhere else (such as this residency programme), in order to consider experiences, thoughts and feelings without the rational restrictions imposed by capitalist structures.

It is from this position that I would like to draw upon the sexual assault of the typist by the clerk in Eliot's The Fire Sermon, as narrated by Tiresias. In the work proposed, Margate becomes a conceptual island from which to engage with and challenge the apathetic response of the typist in the poem, as she concedes her fate as the abused body. Drawing upon recent events, the work will include extracts from films produced by Harvey Weinstein as illustrative gestures, forming part of an installation of empowered female characters that collectively return the gaze of the viewer. Aware of the ‘Clerk’ that has sought to shape their very being, they have awoken from their spectral existence and seek to bring all perpetrators to reckoning.

In this work, the hotel becomes a site for reflections, predictions and time travel. The fading opulence of Nayland Rock Hotel frames the sexual encounter described by Eliot, yet it is simultaneously punctured by an installation that straddles, invades, confronts and overpowers its inherent domesticity. Tiresias’ prophetic presence will be devised during the
residency and filmed on location, forming a narrational thread that amalgamates the past with the present in order to reposition the future foretold.