Now, where were we? Sion Hill Gallery, Bath

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King’s Birthday

Flightpath I

Southampton Docks

Memory Cabinet

Flightpath II / easyjet

Concord

Nostalgiabelia

The Thing and Eileen by the window

Wings, Fuselage, Tail

Sunyata

Yes Dad, I think I see what you mean,

How to do care

Sticklebricks conundrum

Stickebricks conundrum

Sticklebricks conundrum

Launch of the CT scanner, Hayes, Middlesex, 1971

Flightpath III

Portrait of a post-lunch slump

Portrait of a post-lunch slump

Freed

I was

Something

Mostly aluminium

In the clouds

Now, where were we?

Sion Hill Gallery, Bath UK
June 2016

No-one has come back to tell us how advanced dementia feels. We can only try to picture it.

These paintings were made over a year of visits to my father, who has advanced frontotemporal dementia, a rare form which starts comparatively young.

It can be hard to know how to spend time together, especially when his care has been outsourced to professionals. Many times I wonder whether there is much point in going at all - no real reason to think he would understand my visits, or remember them. Drawing and painting turned out to be one of the few honest ways I have had to stay in the room with him.

The condition is usually described as loss. I have come to recognise it also as transition: it dismantles the constructed self - the one we remember and have come to expect. What is left behind is harder to name but no less there.

Accompanying the journey of the memory and personality receding into the distance prompts reflection on being as a human. You glimpse a transition outside of chronological time. Memories fade and understandings of who we are and how things work become unmoored. Mysterious, uncanny, evolving but somehow familiar.

My grandfather, an engineer, helped develop the CT scanner to look inside a person. The grids and seams in these works are inspired by its slice-planes put to different use to invite you to consider an unknowable and unfixed interior state.

Every panel begins with a fluorescent ground. Whatever happens above it - rooms, figures, dissolution - light is consistent.

Something persists beneath the coming-apart. And it is not absence.

Photocredit: Ellie Applegate

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