'Fortune-telling/Re-telling' (2007) taken from the 'Waste Land' project

SD Digital video on 22" monitor facing upwards, colour, sound (9’)

'Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water' (l.43- 55)

‘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.

‘Fortune-telling/Re-telling’ is based on Madame Sosostris's tarot card reading in part one of 'The Waste Land', which is concerned with the search for significance, amid indecision and ambiguity. The superimposition of family photographs with a game of patience and the artist's own tarot card reading makes a distinction between what is known, (the past), what is becoming known (the present) and what is unknown, (the future).