Butterfly Grandma, 2020

Digital illustration.

I stayed up late drawing something to express my pain for my own body and my Grandmas mind. I grew up thinking my Grandma was so cool, she’d take me to the seaside and amazing puppet shows growing up and later in my teens she’d take me to art exhibitions about witches and Japanese erotica. I feel like she always treated me as her intellectual equal despite me being 64 years younger. She was so proud of how my creative mind works and I guess thats something I am mourning the loss of as her mind deteriorates. She has Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) which is a neurological syndrome in which language capabilities become slowly and progressively impaired, eventually developing into Alzheimers. She spent her life trained as an Architect, rebuilding a community centre in Hampstead from the ground up and then retiring to Ireland to build her dream house and planted thousands of trees. This piece is about watching my strong and independent Grandma struggle as her words are trapped inside her head, while i feel trapped in my own body being diagnosed with a rare type of Arthritis in my hip. Shes always been someone I admire and idolise and it hurts that she wont understand that fully in these last years of her life as this syndrome takes my Grandma away from me. Yesterday when we visited her a butterfly almost landed on her head and I had already thought the hips looked like a butterfly so this design evolved from there.