Sally Waterman

Artists Statement.

Waste Land

‘Waste Land’ is the culmination of a five-year project, which comprises twelve photographic and video installations derived from T. S Eliot’s 1922 poem. By utilising adaptation as autobiography, Waterman emotionally embodies the text, appropriating particular lines, concepts or images from ‘The Waste Land’ into her own fragmented narratives or adopting them as titles for the works themselves. Indeed, through the transformative methods of constructed narratives, metaphorical landscapes and performative re-enactments, the ‘Waste Land’ project became an attempt to work through the marital breakdown and divorce of Waterman’s parents and her subsequent estrangement from her father. Therefore, the five distinctive sections of Eliot’s poem represent different stages of the artist’s self-examination of this family trauma, obtained through the therapeutic visualisation of repressed memory.

Serving as a meditation on the past and on the importance of place, each of the works are filmed either on the artist’s childhood home of the Isle of Wight, her current residence in London, or symbolic sites of her imagination. Due to the work’s personal nature, Waterman adopts elusive modes of self-representation in order to situate herself apart from the audience, appearing as an anonymous figure, a ghostly trace or a disembodied self. This multiple, shifting female subjectivity is reinforced through subversive, stylistic techniques of superimposition, speed adjustment and repetition that acknowledges the poem’s modernist context and bricolage structure.

Resume.

 

Sally Waterman’s interdisciplinary media arts practice is concerned with the interpretation of literature into self-portraiture. She creates poetic still and moving image works that explore issues of female subjectivity, memory and identity, drawing upon writers such as Henry James, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. Her doctoral research used T.S Eliot’s 1922 poem, ‘The Waste Land’ as an explorative text to examine her elusive self-representational strategies and interpretative methods, culminating in a collection of photographic and video installations (2005-2010). Waterman re-invents the source material through a fragmentary re-scripting exercise, seeking autobiographical associations with certain images, themes, characters or conceptual ideas. Indeed, the chosen literary text functions as a mechanism for self-representation, enabling the recollection and re-imagining of past trauma. Difficult, yet universal experiences of illness, conflict, loss and separation are illuminated through a cathartic transition from literature into visual art, where repressed memories are addressed through staging the self.

For further information visit http://www.sallywaterman.com