Experiences of Ageing: Residents at Care Home. Visitors to Gigt Center

Description

As a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Center For Healthy Aging at the Faculty for Health and Medical Sciences at University of Copenhagen I was based at Medical Museion and explored aspects of every day ageing within the context of the medical museum collections. Spending time looking and drawing the overlooked, seemingly unimportant and the overly familiar showed that the processes and artefacts associated with ageing are unique and vital. Drawing offers insight and appreciation of an under appreciated aspect of all our lives. One where objects are hidden within the body or socially invisible or deemed insignifiant but are all relevant and beautiful.

These are hands and feet of the ladies attending an arthritis centre in Frederiksberg. One lady wanted to hide her hands as she felt they were ugly. I drew them realistically and did not try to ‘soften’ the deformities. When she saw the drawing she felt maybe her hands were not so bad. As I had seen them as beautiful, she saw them as being beautiful in the drawing.

Lotte is a residential care home for the elderly in Frederiksberg. Between November 2010 and March 2011 I visited residents there and spent time eating and playing banko with them whilst I drew them. I wanted to present them as unique individuals, active, engaged in conversation and games or having their hair done rather than show them as passive and inactive.