SALLY WATERMAN was awarded her practice-based PhD Media and Photography from the University of Plymouth, in 2011. Group shows and screenings include ‘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), ‘What Happens Next?’ Pitzhanger Manor House and Gallery, London (2008), 'Voyage', Künstlerhaus, Dortmund, Germany (2013), 'Bodies of Water', Royal West of England Academy, Bristol (2014), Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York (2017), ‘Journeys with The Waste Land’, Turner Contemporary, Margate (2018), The Family Film Project International Film Festival, Porto, Portugal (2019), 'MK Calling', MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2020), Berlin Short Film Festival (2020), Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival, Turkey (2021) and Barcelona International Short Film Festival (2022).
She has co-curated artist film programmes, which have also featured her work at Richmond American International University, London; Birkbeck cinema, London; ViSiONA festival, Huesca, Spain; Close-Up cinema, London and CCA, Glasgow. Her photographs have featured on book covers for Virago, Random House, Harper Collins and Faber & Faber and her work is held in public collections including The National Art Library at the V&A, London; The School of Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale Center for British Art, New York.
Published writing includes ‘Performing Familial Memory in Against’ in Picturing the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory (Bloombury, 2018), ‘Re-imagining the Family Album through Literary Adaptation’ in Global Photographies: Memory–History–Archives (Transcript, 2018) and 'Staging Sermon: Performing Autobiographical Memory Through The Waste Land' in The Handbook of Research on the Relationship Between Autobiographical Memory and Photography (IGI Global, 2023). She is a senior lecturer in Fashion Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Epsom and is the founder member of the art research group, Family Ties Network.
Waterman’s lens-based work explores narrative, memory and familial relationships through her family archive and literary texts. T.S Eliot’s 1922 poem, ‘The Waste Land’ was used as a framework to examine her self-representational strategies and adaptation methods for her practice-based PhD, which culminated in a series of photographic and video installations (2005-2010). Waterman re-invents the source material through a fragmentary re-scripting exercise, seeking autobiographical associations with certain images, themes, characters or concepts. Indeed, the chosen text functions as a mechanism for self-representation, enabling the recollection and re-imagining of memory. By staging the self in this way, difficult, yet universal experiences of illness, conflict, loss and separation are illuminated through adaptation.