Grandma

Dear All

Sorry I have been absent from the blog for a while. It seems weird to be writing and posting these images here, because it seems quite impersonal, despite feeling like I know you all, and wanting to say something and share these images with you.

My grandma passed away on 16 September. I was at Wysing and felt really excited to be away for the weekend, excited by the possibility of playing around maybe making some new work. My Dad phoned on the saturday morning though to say she had passed away. It has knocked me, more so than I could have thought or imagined.... I guess that saying about not knowing what you've got until it's gone has run through my thoughts several times over the past week.

These are the last photos I took of her. The one with the text over the top was an accident. i had already shot the roll of film and either not taken it out of my camera, or wound it back and then put it back in thinking it was a new film....it is an image I have had in my head for the past ten days.

I spent most of last week up in Scotland, where she lived. I was too young to really understand my Dad's Mum's death, and I was only a baby when my Granfathers passed away. My Grandma is the first person I have lost....but I have nothing but happy memories of her, her gestures, her house, and the way she wrote letters to me.

It seems difficult to talk about...so mater of fact in a way. Friend's grandparents have passed away and it seemed so distant. We all know old people die, but even then it still comes as a shock. Grandma was 94, she was so alive, so kind of feisty still, a bit cheeky, independent.

So, recently I have been feeling...I don't know to be honest. Sad. It is not so much loss I feel, but a protectiveness towards her...like if you were to find a small bird in the garden- fragile and you just want to hold it to try to make it ok. Everything else seems unimportant, and it seems wrong that the world should carry on as usual when this most amazing and beautiful individual is no longer here to share it.

More than anyone else I wrote letters to my Grandma, and our correspondence is something I will miss dearly.

But I have so many memories, most of these are so richly visual- the deep wrinkles in her face- the ornaments and objects in her house, that anywhere else would seem kitsch, but in her home they sat just right...the dollies that sat with their skirts covering her toilet rolls, the small ornaments with beads stuck on where eyes and noses had fallen off....and the smell of her house too.

I still don't think it has really sunk in. I only saw her one or two times a year, but we wrote a lot and I think only in time will it feel real that she is no longer here anymore, with her cheeky smile and opinions and presence.

With love Katherine.