'The Deep Sea Swell' (2009) Taken from the 'Waste Land' project

Two-channel SD digital video floor projection, dimensions variable, colour, sound, 1’30’

'Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell / And the profit and loss' (l.313-14)

'Entering the whirlpool' (l.318)

‘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.

The ghostly layering of past and present is communicated by the slow emergence of a family photograph, appearing through the murky green-blue sea. The work represents a haunting reminder of her father's absence embodied through a visual metaphor that signifies a burial of the past, but also suggests the hidden undercurrents that continue to resurface.