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. Groups of images, each set like a different song in a show. 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.
Earlier this 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.
I’d hoped to have more time, to sing more songs with her, to make more photographs. It’s a huge loss. But there can be a strange beauty alongside the sadness of impending loss. I have tried to convey that here, with metaphorical as well as observational imagery. “An Ordinary Sunday” is a meditation on home and family, music and memory, and the passing of people and time.
This is a snapshot of our evolving work.
