Dementia Object Portraiture
This project began as I was helping my mum trying to clear the clutter from my grandma’s house as she likes to hold onto things! As I was going through draws and looking on her surfaces I was struck by the random grouping of objects, as well as just considering the things she’d held onto and seen as valuable. I took photos, partly just to show my mum how odd it was, but it was also a lovely insight for me into the mind of my grandma; the photos speak to the last ten years of her life. The object portraiture is fascinating to me, how I can see so much of my grandma in them without ever seeing her face in them. To provide this project with more context I decided to team up with a forum run by the Alzheimer’s Society called Talking Point which allows families effected by dementia to experience a community of support. The idea of the partnership is that it would encourage people to use creativity to create something emotive and beautiful out of the pain that comes with having a loved one with dementia, but would also provide an opportunity to encourage them to write about their experiences using the forums to help them process their feelings and share their journeys in a supportive community if they wished. I felt that it was important to link with the specific forum run by the Alzheimer’s society instead of the entire charity, as the purpose of this project is very specific but I feel connects well with the intentions of the forum. I also looked at existing awareness campaigns on Alzheimer’s and found many of them quite depressing and some just wildly inaccurate and unhelpful. Having always been aware that my experience of having a loved one with dementia had been positive, I decided that the tone of the campaign should be too.