'Hushing the Room Enclosed' (2008) Taken from the 'Waste Land' project

Digital video comprising four photographs with looping sound-scape (5’)

Voiceover: Sally Waterman, Veronica Waterman, Deborah Langdon-Smith

Environmental sounds: Footsteps, doors closing

‘Leaned out, Leaning, hushing the room enclosed. Footsteps shuffled on the stair’ (l. 106-107)

‘Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? I never know what you are thinking. Think.’ (l. 111-114)

‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?’ (l.131)

‘What shall we ever do?’ (l.134)

‘What you get married for if you don’t want children?’ (l.164)

Additional lines: ‘Never get married, never have children’

‘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.

‘Hushing the Room Enclosed’ deals with the psychological breakdown of relationships, with parallels drawn between Eliot's troubled marriage and the artist's own experience of parental divorce. The accompanying haunting sound-scape of this photographic installation reinforces this sense of paranoia with its static grid formation of domestic transitory spaces where conversations are overheard and arguments initiated.