The layers that I had to strip back to grow as a person and realize that dad and I are not so different, has prompted my interest in DNA and how the ways we see the world can be passed on to the next generation. When it comes to the photography of myself and my father, our subject choice and how we choose to frame it is uncannily similar, for example.

Dementia revealed a person that I could relate to. I found that my dad softened, and underneath his hard exterior and stubborn nature, I found a warm and caring gentleman. I was fascinated by the effects of dementia: personality changes; the loss of cognitive functioning; and the inability to control emotions. Witnessing my dad soften and become more in-tune with his emotions, I felt as protective over him as I have with my three-year-old son. It wasn't different.

These experiences led me to ask myself: is it that bad to forget?

During my father’s later stages of living with dementia, I learned that memory is just feeling and dementia is the highest form of feeling. Feeling is the essence of life. Dad might not recall that we visited him in the care home, for example, but he will know the feeling of being happy during that time.

Funes the Memorious is a short-story by the Argentinian writer Jorges Luis Borges. Its central character Ireneo Funes is a 19-year-old man who fell off his horse and received a bad head injury, which caused him to acquire an amazing talent—or as Borges describes, a curse—of remembering absolutely everything. Borges believes that there is no difference between dreaming and remembering the past. We must live in the present as the past and future exists only in the human mind. 

What does it mean to remember? to forget!

Initially, when I started this project, I instructed my mother and father to write down the first thing they thought about when they looked at a carefully curated image from my father’s archive. This was very revealing and showed me how quickly my dad’s memory was deteriorating. As his dementia progressed, he was no longer able to write and felt awkward about doing it until he eventually refused to.  

Manipulating my father’s images – adding stickers, cutting, painting, scratching and punching holes - is a response to his comments about an array of images from his archive – what and who he could remember and that which he could not- as well as my grief.

Some stickers have numbers on them, which represents birthdays and death dates, as well as questioning life and death more broadly. The black stickers symbolise no memory whatsoever. In my practice, stickers are an analogy for the brain and its "stickiness" that allows memories to cling to it. 

Many people living with Dementia change and can have a whole host of responses, such as sundowning, hallucinations, delusions, acts of violence, acting overly sexual with others, shuffling on their feet, lack of facial reactions, and sleeping more because of the degeneration of the neuron that keeps us awake. I reference these aspects of the disease within Age is a privilege, unless we forget! and I hope that it encourages dialogue about the nature, impacts and experiences of dementia.