Journeys with 'The Waste Land' (2015-2018) [multi-component output with contextualising information]
- Submitting institution
-
Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 3372
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, England & Turner Contemporary, Margate, England.
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first exhibition
- -
- Year of first exhibition
- 2018
- URL
-
https://doi.org/10.17870/bathspa.c.4979867
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This project was a complex multi-component output over an extended period. Its core
research question, how participation works in a major creative project, engaged Tooby from
its initiation and development phase in 2012-2015 through its delivery over 2015-19. The
research methodology required intensive face-to-face workshops, meetings and research
visits centred on two locations in different parts of the UK. This dual-centred process also
created comparative outputs by consistent research methodologies being applied in distinct
contexts. The necessary peer networking and ‘desk’ research conducted alongside also took
place over an extended period.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ is a long-term participatory project led by Mike Tooby, with major exhibitions and public programmes in 2018 for Turner Contemporary Margate and The Herbert Coventry and partner venues.
The research inverted the typical linear route from research to public engagement in which audience members are ‘targeted’ by engagement only after concepts and content are decided. Instead, they devised, advocated and controlled the approaches to content and engagement from the outset.
Key research questions were: how do participatory methodologies, usually confined to small-scale short-term projects, work in major exhibitions with long lead times and big quantitative targets? can participatory methodologies change the relationship between curating and the responsibilities for public engagement?
Over 100 volunteer participants were recruited by ‘open call’ to co-create exhibitions and events in response to T. S. Eliot’s poem, (partly written in Margate and often associated with post-war Coventry). The exhibitions were large scale and included loans of major historic and contemporary works of art and new commissions. Scheduling, budgets, audience targets and evaluation, were themselves addressed through participative methodologies.
Initiated in 2012, from 2015 Tooby worked with Margate-based curator, Dr. Trish Scott. They co-ordinated the Participant Research Group, recruited in 2015 through ‘open call’. From 2016 a second group led by Tooby developed a Coventry version.
The Research Groups involved over 100 individuals. People with no prior knowledge of Eliot and modernist poetry, or visual arts and curating, joined people with longstanding interests in them. Off-site programmes engaged further partners and participants. Some research activities developed their own identities as continuing projects.
The chief outcomes were: two major exhibitions demonstrating a tested new participative methodology; new insights on relationships between visual arts and poetry; a website dedicated to the project’s process including participant testimony (https://www.jwtwlresource.com) and dissemination nationally and internationally.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
