'In the Cage' (2007) Taken from the 'Waste Land' project

Digital video projection, silent, looped, dimensions variable, colour, silent (3.33’)

‘In the Cage’ is inspired by part two of T. S Eliot’s 1922 poem, 'The Waste Land', entitled ‘A Game of Chess’. The work re-envisages Eliot’s original title, which was drawn from Sibyl, the Greek mythological figure in the poem’s epigraph as well as Henry James’ novella, ‘In the Cage’. 

However, parallels can be drawn between the relationship in James’s novel, Eliot’s troubled marriage and Waterman’s own experience of parental divorce. The title’s metaphorical image of imprisonment is evocative of an inner psychological wasteland, where the non-communication between the poem’s speakers is conceptually interpreted as a series of gestures that are ‘acted out’ by Waterman, entrapped between two pillars within a sparse, stage-like space. 

The continually moving figure in this slowly dissolving sequence tries to negotiate her body within the recess space at the centre of the frame. Her inability to escape to, or communicate with, the ‘other side’, is momentarily realised when a statuette pose is struck, resulting in a temporal pausing of manoeuvres, signifying an acceptance of this impossible barrier. Indeed, the looped, recurring actions of this anonymous isolated figure set against this classical backdrop, seeks to reference the wealth of historical, mythological and contemporary female characters that occupy Eliot’s text, who are bound up in a repetitive cycle of mundane, mechanical tasks.