Kate Carpenter

Kaleidoscope

The last few years have found me caring for my mother and aunt, both ‘living with dementia,’ as their mother did before them.  My mother, like my late father, was a photographer.  The old family album is a wonderful archive, but, aptly enough, it has fallen to pieces over the decades.  There are blank pages, dried up pieces of tape, prints jumbled and identities forgotten.  Other pictures resurfaced after years in the attic, and began to take turns on the mantelpiece like an ever-changing museum of our lives.

It was a tale I wanted to share.  I asked myself the question: how do you tell a story about dementia when family members are in the thick of it?

One approach is to attempt a linear narrative.  To pin things down before they are forgotten, create a prompt to family storytelling; to impose order on chaos, a chronology when time gets out of joint.  To re-tell old stories, cement family legend.  To anticipate the losses to come and set out a version of the story that you think your future self will want to hear.

Another approach is to enter the world of forgetting itself. Have beginnings, middles and endings, but as Jean-Luc Godard said, not necessarily in that order. Shuffle time like a pack of cards, with blanks and gaps and repetition.  Explore darkness with metaphor, unmoor yourself from reality. Express as best you can the unravelling of identity that begins as the autobiographical memory falters.

Kaleidoscope blends these two approaches. I use rephotographed archival imagery and new documentary work, punctuating these with the woodland images I make to process my feelings about the present and future.  These images serve as a metaphor for memory and forgetting, tangled root and branch structures expressing ideas about the twin legacies of dementia and photography in my family, and what it all means for me.

About the Artist

Artist Website

Kate’s photographer-parents brought her up with a love of photography. She studied English and German at university and has taught in schools and colleges in the UK, Germany and Belgium. Kate has an MA in Education, a Law degree, and an MA in Photography. She has also worked as an advice centre volunteer and run private and pro-bono photography workshops.

Her photographic work tells stories about family, memory and forgetting, blending metaphors in woodland landscapes with documentary, portrait and archival imagery. Much of it is rooted in the experience of caring for her grandmother, aunt and mother through the years of their dementia.
Kate is based in the south of England. Her work has been exhibited in the UK and beyond, and has featured in various print and online publications, including her own recent photobook Kaleidoscope.