CONCLUSION
This research project was inspired by questions arising in response to Solnit’s definition of ‘lost’ as having “...two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing."496 I began by wondering if the ultimate expression or experience of lostness could be found in combinations of the familiar and unfamiliar – if such lostness might be located in neurodegenerative conditions, or serve as a lens through which to approach insights into cognitive decline.
People living with dementia are capable of advocating for themselves, as evidenced by the facilitated Dementia Engagement and Empowerment Project (DEEP)497 and, in academia, the small but increasing number of studies in which they lead and/or are involved in designing research as ‘experts by experience’. What I and other artist practitioners are able to do differently is apply creative expertise (in my case acquired over several decades) to ‘speak’ about rather than for, and this doctoral project points to the potentials for further enquiry, through the specific mediums utilised (photography, moving image, installation, creative writing, artists’ books) and beyond.
My work has always been about other people, and in my practice pre-PhD this involved using photography in a more conventional way. The decision to take an entirely different approach in this research involved a complete change of strategy in order to circumvent an “epistemology of sight… trapped within a material dynamic that accesses subjectivity only through the visible aspects of” the ‘bodies’ one is looking at,498 so as to ‘see’ not a diseased or disabled body as object “but… a person’s experience of embodiment.”499 If, as discussed, dementia is considered as unknowing, and creative practice research is, or begins with, not-knowing, both are forms of lostness that, while dissimilar, have proven in this research to be productively complementary. In the process of addressing the research questions, a body of work was produced that formed, in a series of related artworks, novel photographic approaches to cognitive decline. It found the familiar and unfamiliar combined to be relevant to aspects of dementia as lived experience, and discovered that photography as medium can be ideal for such enquiry as it, too, holds this paradoxical combination.
This reflective creative practice research has generated new knowledge and identified the need for further scholarship in several domains. It has considered together, for the first time, Alina Szapocznikow (1926-1973) and Helen Chadwick (1953-1996), two 20th century artists whose works challenge the separation of photography and sculpture, and in so doing points to a gap in critical thinking about photography as a dimensional medium that begs to be addressed. While stereoscopy has greatly influenced literature, in the visual arts it has been less appreciated, both art historically and in practical application, as this research indicates. Julien C. Hughes’ assertion that engagement with dementia can lead to beneficial broadening of our perspectives500 has been confirmed. As an illustration of this, dementia reveals the extent to which interpretation is significant to visual perception, which consequently invites review of photography as an analogical medium. Attention to the conceptual implications of dementia can, then, provide insights with ramifications beyond enhanced comprehension of it as lived experience. While this research found that lostness and unknowing provided obliquely productive modes of approach to visually addressing perceptual disorientations in cognitive decline, the discovery that understandings of dementia can in turn be lenses through which to reappraise the assumed familiarity of things, like photography, has been a revelation.
As my research concluded I found myself thinking back to the woman my mother introduced me to in the 1980s, who I saw then as ‘still and silent, there and oddly also not, like a photograph.’ I still wonder, perhaps now more than ever, what she might have said if able to speak. But this does indicate further need for work that, in Chadwick’s words, may “open up a crease in language and look at what cannot be articulated”501 – that seeks to know, even if “there’s nothing to see but a vagueness of clouds.”502