Grandmother Exercise 2 is a medium-format portrait of my deceased grandmother, printed on a natural linen cloth, with a manual unravelling intervention. (50 x 70 cms). General View.

Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, August 2020.

 

In this photographic incarnation, the chosen material responds to the tight relationship of the portrayed with clothing due to her trade of dressmaker. The "unravelling" of the fabric, exposes fine threads that resemble my grandmother's soft white hair but also disarranges her face producing a new partial and blurred representation. This intrusive gesture of erasing part of a portrait represents how diseases such as Alzheimer violently attack the elderlyHowever, due to the nature of the manual labour that this technique entails, this gesture is also a delicate intervention, through which I allude to the elder’s skin, especially sensitive and fragile. Inspired by my own experience, the interruptions and fading of the final image that this photographic incarnation entails represent the vulnerability of memories over time.