The brief was to llustrate the effects that Alzheimer’s disease has on memory. My Grannie along with 856,700 others in Britain suffer from this disease. Often whilst the sufferer’s long- term memory is able to retain specific times, their short-term memory is unable to retain information.The inability to store new memories or recall details of the recent past is the first sign of Alzheimer’s. Using photography as the main medium allowed me to understand how the human image changes over time.The archival photographs which I distorted in my screen prints contrast sharply to those which I took in my initial research.
The final images are screenprints of archival photography. Alzheimer’s is caused by synaptic failure – the failure of the wires in the brain. I hand stitched ages into the prints and linked them with strands of thread, representing the tangling of these “wires” across the obscured images of her life. Each number is representational of points in her life, with ages that she finds comfort appearing multiple times. The way my Grandmother’s memory works is akin to a game of “dot to dot” - trying to gather together the details she best recollects and then join them in a line of construct.
A narrative was created by distorting the photographs from different points of my grandmother’s life in progressive degrees. Her memories from her early life remain intact whilst more recent memories are completely obliterated and unrecognisable. Altering the photographs created new outcomes, beginning with something representational, and then meticulously pulled it apart.
