'Wellow' (2020) Taken from the 'Wellow' project

HD Digital video, 11 mins 

Quotations extracted from 'East Coker' (1940), 'The Dry Salvages' (1941), and 'Little Gidding' (1942) from 'Four Quartets' by T.S Eliot 

The ‘Wellow’ project (2019-2020) dwells upon place, ancestry, mortality and religion, triggered by the redevelopment of the artist's late Grandfather’s Baptist chapel in a rural village on the Isle of Wight. Drawing upon T.S Eliot’s poem, ‘Four Quartets’ (1935-1942), correlations are made between the temporality of human life, the changing seasons and her ancestor’s connection to the local landscape. 

This autobiographical work considers the role of faith within her mother’s family and the generational differences in their religious practices and attitudes. A sense of loss - of the building, of traditions, of heritage and of community is inherent, as the artist gathers and reflects upon the memories and artefacts that are left behind. Pivotal to the story, is her mother’s saved plot, positioned next to her parent’s grave, which raises questions of uncertainty in relation to the future of the site. 

‘Wellow’ contemplates Waterman’s family history through a series of still images taken from the archive, juxtaposed with photographs of the derelict chapel and the overgrown graveyard. The self-reflexive exchanges between the artist and her mother, recorded during the coronavirus outbreak, not only allows the recollection of past experience, as well as the forgotten aspects to emerge, but also reveals the construction of the filmmaking process itself. The extracted quotations from ‘East Coker’ (1940), based upon Eliot’s ancestral village in Somerset and ‘Little Gidding’ (1942), informed by the historic Christian community near Huntingdon, help to illuminate themes of time, life cycles and renewal, creating a multi-layered narrative.