Sally Waterman, born in the Isle of Wight in 1974 but who now lives in London. She studied a BA (Hons) degree in English with Design Arts at the University of Plymouth where she graduated in 1995. She then went on to complete an MA at Goldsmiths University, London where she graduated with a Master’s in Image & Communication (Photography) in 1996.
Waterman is a photographic artist who creates her work to a very personal level. PastPresent is a project of Waterman’s where she has collected and found images from her childhood past and places them where the original images were taken. These places hold significant memories to Waterman as they are her way of creating images of herself to connect with her sense of loss after her parents divorced when she was younger.
PastPresent is a short project within a bigger series of images of her project ‘Wasteland’. The project is the outcome of a five year project between 2005 and 2010. The project is based on twelve different parts of T.S Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’.
The project was her own version of an autobiography where she carefully selected different parts from the poem that she personally connected with to add to her images and videos she was creating. She carefully selected words and quotes from the poem which eventually became the titles for the separate pieces of work.
“And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free' (l.13-17)”
When Waterman was younger her parents got divorced and then her father decided to leave, this project was created to show the sense of loss she felt when both of these events happened in her life so closely together, the five different parts to the poem represented the different, difficult stages in her life.
The images and videos are all shot in either her childhood home, areas from the island she grew up on and London. Some of them are even images that she’s imagined.
I can connect and relate to Waterman’s images especially the one above because it reminds me of when we would sit out in the garden with family. I have been through a similar experience to her, my parents got divorced when I was younger, but I still see my father. I want to create a photographic project that revisits places that I visited when I was younger. As I said previously, when I was younger, my parents divorced and I didn’t really see it coming and didn’t really understand why it was happening to me but now I understand a lot more. I want my project to be based on how times have changed for me. Some of the places I’m going to be visiting were where I visited when we were a family of four but I will now be visiting them on my own. Researching into Waterman has made me relate to her work even more and made me understand her work more on an emotional level. I can understand that by Waterman revisiting the places where the memories were created originally was her attempt of trying to connect with her sense of loss of her parents divorce.
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