Marking Time – my very personal response to my father’s Alzheimer’s
Overview
In the summer of 2018 as I completed my MA in Design at UWE, Bristol, I was beginning to think of how I could tell stories through my mark-making. My father had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2007. In 2016, a few years after my mother died, he could no longer live at home, even with the support of carers, and so we moved him from Stoke-on-Trent to Bristol to live in a care home near us. In June 2018 his condition had deteriorated and after a spell in hospital had to be moved to a nursing home.
I wanted to explore how his dementia had affected both him and me and so the seeds of an idea were formed. Needing focus to create the collection I was conceiving I applied to take part in the Crafts Council’s Collect Open exhibition as part of Collect: International Art Fair for Modern Craft and Design at the Saatchi Gallery in London in February 2019. I was successful in my application and this allowed me to focus on exploring the ideas that I was interested and create my Marking Time collection.
Taking part in Collect Open was a wonderful opportunity for me to meet and talk with an audience about my work and my ideas. I had lots of very emotional conversations with visitors who wanted to share their experiences of dementia with me, which was a privilege. The response to the work was touching and most of the pieces sold during the four day fair.
The Collection
My very personal response to my father’s Alzheimer’s Disease resulted in the collection of works I called ‘Marking Time’. I concentrated on the way that dementia affects memory: the nature and significance of the memories we hold, how they make us who we are and the way in which we pass them on. Memories are moments stitched together in time. When dementia strips away those memories we become less ourselves, we lose our identity. We are still someone to love and cherish, but we cannot love and cherish in return. We rely on those around us to hold our memories, but our grasp on them is fleeting.
My father, Enos Lovatt, died in early December 2018 during the creation of this installation, which had a profound effect on many of the finished works. The installation consists of two related parts – Take Me Home and Who Am I?
Take Me Home was a collection of works that reference The White House at Mow Cop in Staffordshire; the home where my father lived from the age of 13 until his early 30s. The White House was a small holding nestled against a hillside overlooking the Cheshire plain. It not only represents the golden age of my father’s teenage years, spent with his loving parents and siblings, but the place where he began a creative journey that lasted over 65 years: he was a painter.
All the work is hand carved leather, the marks created are filled with acrylic colour.
Take Me Home – the artworks
The White House
2018
102x62cm
hand carved leather and acrylic paint
Here I am representing the home that my father wanted to return to at the end of his life where he thought his father and mother were waiting for him. He often asked when the bus was coming to take him home.
The house itself was demolished by my cousin after the death of my uncle who had lived in the house after my grandmother died. A new red brick house replaced the white cottage that had stood there. The white cottage is what is depicted here. I wanted it to fade into the sky which was raining tears for the loss of this home – it was a ghost house.
The White House was also very important to me growing up as I would visit my grandmother each weekend. As a child I had always wanted to own and live in this house when I grew up. It nestled into the side of a hill and overlooked the vastness that is the Cheshire Plain.
Hillside I and Hillside II
2019
30x30cm and 34x83cm
hand carved leather and acrylic paint
I have very fond memories of walking along this hillside, often over the top to the little methodist church with my father as we visited my grandfather’s grave. There was woodland on this hillside and a cave or two, but my fondest memories are sitting in amongst the heather and the brambles and the bilberries singing to myself, and when in season eating the sweetest tiny bilberries. My father also spent many happy hours on this hillside alone and with his family.
I have spent many happy hours lying on my back in these fields in childhood through into adulthood staring up at the clouds passing by, listening to the grasshoppers, the bees, the flies, the wind in the trees. The land was always important to my father and many of his paintings depicted these places that were dear to him.
Harvest
2018
151x67cm
hand carved leather and acrylic paint
The White House was originally the home of my grandmother’s parent’s small market gardening business. It stood on a few acres that included fields of grass. At harvest time the famly would cut the grass with scythes and rake it up.
Studio
2019
29x62cm
hand carved leather and acrylic paint
My grandparents purchased a large shed for my father in the mid-1960s to create a painting studio for him to paint in. Previously he had been painting in a chicken coop. This studio represented their faith in him and their encouragement of him to pursue his artistic goals. My grandfather was a miner who together with my grandmother actively supported all their children’s creative promise.
Inheritance stools
2019
48x46x40cm
hand carved leather and acrylic paint, hand stitched with waxed linen thread
These stools were created to represent the time we should take to sit and listen to those around us and hear their stories, because if and when they forget their stories we become the custodians who repeat those stories to our children. We inherit the stories and pass them on.
Who Am I? – the artworks
Loop
2018
43x43cm
hand carved leather and acrylic paint
Loop is about the conversatoins I would have with my father over and over and over again. Ideas would fixate in his head and he would repeat them again and again leading to frustration on both sides.
Lost
2018
43x43cm
hand carved leather and acrylic paint
Lost is about the confusion of the dementia sufferer in the earlier stages when they know something isn’t quite right and they become increasingly lost in their universe. It also represents the feelings I had as my compass that was my father became more distant and I felt lost in myself.
Disappearing
2019
43x43cm
hand carved leather and acrylic paint
Disappearing is about how the memories fade as dementia takes hold and the sufferer becomes a different person, a shell of their former selves.
Memory Loss
2019
79x32cm
hand carved leather and acrylic paint, hand stitched with waxed linen thread
Memory Loss is a stitched floor piece that, like Disappearing, represents the progression of dementia and the retreat of memories.
Treasure
2019
11x23x23cm
hand carved leather and acrylic paint, hand stitched with waxed linen thread
Treasure was fully conceived after the death of my father. This vessel is hand stitched and the interior is coloured gold. It contains some of the leather marks cut from the works created for the entire collection. It is about the memories we treasure after someone we love has gone. Each mark that I carved from the leather was a moment in time from both my life and my father’s that I will treasure.
