Anglia Ruskin University

Waste Land

Date: 3 - 27 October 2012
Venue: Main gallery and balcony

Private View: Thursday 4 October, 5.00pm

Sally Waterman employs literary adaptation as a mechanism for self-portraiture, producing photographic and video works that explore memory, place and familial relationships. Waste Land draws upon TS Eliot's 1922 poem to examine the marital breakdown and divorce of Waterman's parents and her subsequent estrangement from her father. Seeking autobiographical associations with certain images, themes, characters or ideas, Waterman re-interprets the poem to retrieve memories of conflict and separation.

Taken over a five-year period, Waste Land combines vernacular photography with staged scenarios to create elusive self-portraits. Meditating on her past, Waterman re-assesses her family album by re-photographing snapshots around her childhood home on the Isle of Wight, or constructing a multi-layered visual autobiography. Through an emotional engagement with the text, Waterman re-enacts repressed memories of family arguments, or performs as an anonymous figure within metaphorical landscapes.

Waterman received her PhD in Media & Photography at the University of Plymouth in 2011. Past group exhibitions include Forest, Nottingham Castle Museum, Oriel Davies Gallery, Wolverhampton Gallery and York Art Gallery (2004-2005) and What Happens Next?, Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery, London (2008).

Sally Waterman will also be in conversation with Professor Liz Wells (University of Plymouth) on Saturday 27 October 2012 at 2.30pm in Ruskin 203 (entrance on the gallery balcony).

Back to exhibition archive 2012-13