Picturing Clouds of Unknowing: Photography, Lostness, and Cognitive Decline

Lucy Carolan

The central premise of this doctoral project is that the progressive cognitive ambiguity that is dementia can be creatively apprehended by way of lostness. As defined by Rebecca Solnit, ‘lost’ holds “...two disparate meanings. Losing things is about the familiar falling away, getting lost is about the unfamiliar appearing.” The initial hypothesis of this research was that in certain neurodegenerative conditions the familiar and unfamiliar can confoundingly combine, and that it’s through the lens of this particular combination that some comprehension of dementia as lived experience may be approached. The disorienting misperceptions most commonly encountered in cognitive decline are visual in nature. Given, then, that dementia reveals the importance of vision to perception, how may the photographic, with lostness as optic, be used to illuminate cognitive decline? In what ways can creatively visualising aspects of neurodegeneration in dementia inform understandings of its existential ambiguities?

COVID IMPACT STATEMENT

The first lockdown in 2020 began with the closure of my university, at very short notice, on 18th March. Prior to starting the PhD, I’d spent decades as freelancer so thought working from home again wouldn’t be an issue, but the enforced (and often unpredictable) restrictions, with concerns about illness and other uncertainties, were surprisingly difficult to adapt to.

Over the first year of the pandemic it was easier to gauge the impact on my research – the closure of research facilities, the cancelled events and opportunities, the abandonment of plans etc – and, as mentioned in the thesis, Covid disruptions began at a pivotal point in my studies, a time when it felt like I had a lot to lose. As the pandemic wore on and nothing noteworthy happening become normal, its negatives became less easy to identify: it’s difficult to be disappointed by might-have-beens you’ve no awareness of.

On the positive side, I’ve yet to catch Covid, and the protracted period of reduced opportunity unexpectedly gave me an insight into what life for the elderly might be like. A questionnaire I considered using in a piece of work included tests intended to rate disorientation by, for example, asking participants to identify the date an interview was taking place. Sometime in early 2021 I woke up, realised I didn’t have a clue what day it was and, as a result, and concluded that this means of gauging whether or not someone may have cognitive decline is likely flawed if it doesn’t take the interviewee’s featureless living conditions into consideration – but I found that really interesting to think about, and my artists’ book Cloud Complex was partly influenced by this.

Otherwise, my PhD took longer than it should have, getting things done was much harder than it would otherwise have been, and the Covid extensions I was granted, though very welcome and necessary, couldn’t really mitigate for disruption. Extra time didn’t make up for lack of access to a studio in which to make planned works that required space and specialist equipment. Extra time didn’t replace scrapped arrangements to meet people living with dementia, and find out how this might have altered the course of my research. Extra time led to me running out of funds in a cost of living crisis. But then: “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”⁵⁰³ The research I was able to achieve is something I feel good about regardless of the circumstances it was undertaken in. Things could have been worse.

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