On Margate Sands

On Margate Sands takes its inspiration from At the Violet Hour, a 2018 exhibition at Nayland Rock Hotel, Margate, next to the bus shelter where Eliot wrote part of The Waste Land. For this show painter Susie Hamilton hung over eighty works from floor to ceiling in Room 416: paintings and drawings which respond to the fragmented and diverse nature of the poem and range from depictions of the sordid to the luminous, from the gloom of Hades or The City of London to the light of ‘the hyacinth garden’.

The book also includes examples of earlier work since The Waste Land is a presence in many of her former series: solitary figures in wilderness, figures with shadows, figures on beaches and paintings based on The Tempest.