I...

About identity

This artwork is about identity. What determines who you are? Is it nature, nurture, experiences, memories, a basic 'I' over which all this is draped? All these aspects are stored somewhere in our brain and connected. You can retrieve memories, which makes you travel in time, to the place/event and the person you were then. But what if you can no longer access your memories? No longer know who you were at a certain time? Who are you then?

The reason for this, in a sense, philosophical question was the reality of my father. He suffered from vascular dementia; the scan literally showed holes in his brain. The connections disappeared, were sometimes re-established, but incorrectly connected. By experiencing this disease up close, I wondered where your identity resides, or is, or forms.

My father woke up every day trying to figure out where he was, in what time he was and where he needed to go. Sometimes he was a little boy looking for his mother, then again, the young man who asked my mother to marry him, or he was on a scientific field trip abroad and bills were unpaid, or the students were lazy. And we, the bystanders, witnessed this suffering and tried to reassure him in the time and person he thought he was at that moment.

He was desperate, he was confused. He experienced this every day, several times. It was heartbreaking.

He didn’t know how to cope with the circumstances as he no longer recognized them. ?His memories became reality for him, but in a different place and time. He had no influence on this anymore and he lived in a hallucinatory world. These memories/realities would pop up and were mingled amongst each other, so the timeline through them was just a messy heap of thread.

Are you still yourself when everything in your head is messed up, no longer accessible at will, but randomly presented? I think my father was lost and his body was soulless at the time he died.

About the artwork

This artwork shows multiple, unconnected, pages that refer to multiple parts of the brain with memories of different times and people. Or is it all the same person? Does your personality consist of the memories you make? But if you don't have access to that memory, is that part of your personality lost?

The images are affected, no longer complete, like the memories in my father's head. Sometimes he could only see part of a memory, or his brain connected it to another time, or another memory, or his brain just made something up.

The separate pages, handmade kahdi paper with rough edges, represent the parts of the brain that are no longer connected, or not connected as they used to be. The background is a map of isobars (lines of equal pressure). My father was a Professor of Meteorology and the weather continued to play a big role in his life. The lines of equal pressure connect the images/memories. But they connect things that shouldn't be connected, which confuses my father. Confusion that leads to despair. He lost access to his memories, lost himself.

From a distance you see a glumly old man in the middle. This is my father, a few months before he died. If you look closer, you see who he was, all the roles he fulfilled in his life; son, fiancé, husband, scientist, father, marathon runner (Dutch Champion), meteorologist, grandfather.

I chose cyanotype as an art form. It is a photographic process. My father has been a photographer all his life, even had his own darkroom in a closet as a teenager. It is also a fairly unpredictable art form in terms of the outcome. It depends, among other things, on the formula/emulsion used, the paper, the exposure time and the weather/sunshine. Since my father was a meteorologist, I thought it was appropriate to choose a weather-dependent art form. As for the unpredictability, that fits his dementia which was very unpredictable.

Dementia is a disease in which you lose yourself despite your constant struggle to find yourself in time and space.

Rest in peace dad