'Sermon' photographs (2008-2009) Taken from the 'Waste Land' project

Black and white photographic diptychs with text (600 x 500 mm image on 841 x 594 mm A1 paper), 9 in series

‘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.

'Sermon' (2008-2009), focuses upon the emotional aftermath of separation and the disclosure of hidden secrets, portrayed through a series of photographic diptychs that are reminiscent of Hogarth's 'The Rake's Progress'.