In 2003 my mother began to show signs of memory loss eventually diagnosed as dementia. During the last six years of her life, I documented her decline through audio tapes and photographs. The act of losing one’s memory and sense of time is difficult at best to describe but can be understood through an experience of it. It reminds me of “calving” a term used to describe the process when huge chunks of glaciers just break off and fall into the sea. It is as if the mind “calves” and there seems to be no end to the process.

In part to acknowledge her and in part as a coping mechanism, in the summer of 2008 I began a body of work, Hopes & Dreams, a series of large format digital prints that act as a visual memoir and attempt to visually describe this “loss of memory.” This suite of large-scale digital prints attempts to express this decline visually and provides a glimpse inside the horror and fear one is forced to life with.

This suite of work reflects the “arc” of her life. Using two specific images of my mother when she was full of hope and life and at the threshold of her adult life in combination with artifacts, affirmations, personal writing (by her) and digital technology, I created a suite of work that gives the viewer some sense of this process as well as a poignancy for the loss of one’s life, while one is still very aware and conscious. Anyone living with or caring for someone with Alzheimer’s or dementia responds to the poignancy and tragedy in this body of work.

These works were completed in the summer of 2010. They have been digitally printed, and fabricated (mounted on sintra and glazed with Plexiglas). Each work is 43 ¼ X 32 ¼” in an edition of 5.