I Knew Nothing (2006) Taken from the 'Waste Land' project

SD Digital video on wall-mounted monitor, colour, sound (1 min, 40 secs)

'I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living no dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence' (l.38-41)

‘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.