Sally Waterman employs literary adaptation as a mechanism for self-portraiture, creating poetic still and moving image works that explore female subjectivity, memory and identity. Waterman re-invents the source material through a fragmentary re-scripting exercise, seeking autobiographical associations with certain images, themes, characters or conceptual ideas.
Indeed, the chosen text enables the recollection and re-imagining of repressed memories, whereby difficult, yet universal experiences of illness, conflict, loss and separation are illuminated through a cathartic transition from literature into visual art. Her PhD in Media & Photography at the University of Plymouth used T.S Eliot’s 1922 poem, ‘The Waste Land’ to examine her elusive self-representational strategies and interpretative methods.
Past group exhibitions have included ‘Shifting Horizons’; Derby Museum & Art Gallery and Midland Arts Centre (2000-2001), ‘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). Her work is held in public and private collections including King St. Stephen Museum, Székesfehérvar, Hungary, the National Art Library at the V&A and the Yale Center for British Art, New York.
She has lectured at Plymouth College of Art and the University of Plymouth and was a visiting fellow at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London (2011-2012), where she organised the conference; ‘Family Ties: Recollection and Representation’.
