'Who is the Third Who Walks Always Beside You?' (2009) Taken from the 'Waste Land' project

Two-channel SD digital video projection, dimensions variable, colour, silent, 5 mins

‘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.

This funereal walking performance addresses Waterman's estrangement from her father, appropriating the emotional barrenness of the poem to represent this family trauma. The rail provides a useful metaphor for family separation, signifying a barrier, which divides the father from his daughter and son.