This new body of work draws inspiration from the ancient Greek poet Hesiod’s epic poem Works and Days, from which the exhibition takes its title. A foundation of pastoral literature, Hesiod’s conception of human life as gradually degrading from an idyllic harmony with nature was later taken up by Renaissance painters. The figure of the shepherd appears as witness and caretaker of natural phenomena and the cycles of life and death in nature. Waterston was inspired by this balance of hope and pessimism in the human condition. The paintings embrace this unresolved tension between beauty and toil, merging abstracted and figurative forms in a destabilized pictorial space.

Waterston also weaves in the history of the sublime landscape, a vision of nature that reaches a deeply psychological level of both fright and awe. Considering the sublime as a site of simultaneous beauty and discomfort, he confuses our sense of perspective, shifting between scales that could either be microscopic or monumental. Each painting operates in its own visual syntax, evoking its own sense of time, rhythm, and movement.