An Ordinary Sunday

As my mother’s memory unravels, her world becomes unfamiliar, distorted, amorphous.  Her recognition of people and places is shattering to pieces.  Memories are slippery, submerging and re-emerging, layering up in strange ways before disappearing beneath the waves forever.  There are ghosts, ghosts of memories, memories of ghosts.

She stays at home, not knowing that it’s home, but she loves the garden that she has tended for decades.  For a long time, it’s her saviour, her respite, but towards the end it becomes an impossible task even to get outside.  We’re sad to watch its decline; it mirrors her own, intensifies the sense of loss.

Eventually, music becomes our primary means of communication.  She has perfect recall of all her favourite songs. Just as I share my mother’s love of photography, my daughter Eleanor shares her love of musical theatre, plays the piano for her.  We sit in the window with her, singing.

Eleanor suggests combining these two loves, taking principles of musical theatre storytelling, and applying them to the photographic series that’s emerging in these last months of my mother’s life.   The title An Ordinary Sunday is taken from a Sondheim musical, underlining the routine nature of these days, and the fleeting, shadowy beauty that we are somehow hoping to immortalise. 

Early last year, and much, much too soon, my mother became ill; her advanced Alzheimer’s ruling out surgery.  She spent her last days at home, peaceful, in a room filled with music and light, big doors wide open to her beloved garden.

We’d hoped to have more time, to sing more songs with her, to make more photographs. It’s a huge loss. In creating this body of work, Eleanor and I have tried to make some kind of sense of it all. “An Ordinary Sunday” is a meditation on home and family, music and memory, and the passing of people and time.

Book and exhibition by Kate and Eleanor coming November 2026.

“As we pass

Through arrangements of shadows

Towards the verticals of trees

Forever”

Sunday from “Sunday in the Park with George” by Stephen Sondheim