We had the incredible pleasure of having Celine Marchbank come to the university in my first year where she gave us a fantastic talk about her book Tulip and her oncoming book A Stranger in my Mother kitchen. Her speech was so inspiring I think about it all of the time, even now, a year and a half after the event. When I wrote a blog post about her talk, I mentioned that I was highly inspired to create a project about my nan, which I still am, however at the moment as I am creating a photographic project about Jake’s nan.
Her book Tulip is about her mother who was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer which was confirmed to be terminal after them trying a million and one different treatments and trials.
Marchbank documented her mother’s unique characteristics in the most positive way that she could during these horrible times. Flowers were placed all over her mother's house. So Celine Marchbank used this as a way of showing symbolic meanings showing feelings such as love, happiness, generosity, decay and isolation.
She documented little things, such as her mother’s food or small aspects around the house beautifully and aesthetically, which shows her and her mother’s characters.
Tulip was displayed in so many articles such as the guardian and BBC News and shown on a lot of photography pages such as Shutterhub and the Royal Photographic Society. It must have been such a difficult task for her to photograph her mother knowing that she did not have long left with her, I can only imagine what she was going through during the process of the image taking.
Interestingly, before relooking at her book, I feel some of the images I have taken for my project resemble her images a fair amount, for example the image below of her medication box and showing her cat.
This just shows how much she inspired me, the fact that I managed to make images very similar to hers without even fully remembering the content in her book.
Not long after her mother sadly passed away, she created another project called ‘A Stranger in my Mothers kitchen’ where she was working learning how to say goodbye to the tried of losing her mother.
’I’m not quite sure what or whom this stranger is. Is it who she became through her illness? Is it the cancer that eventually killed her? Or is it me, left standing in my mother’s kitchen wondering what to do next? Perhaps it’s the grief, this crippling feeling I hadn’t had the pleasure to meet before, and wish I never had.’
Within this project, she documents her experience with the grief she encountered. Her mother had left lots of old recipes which Celine Marchbank taught herself how to cook to allow herself to feel closer to her mother again. she then decided to travel to America where her mother grew up, however, she did not feel the connection that she particularly wanted as the stories and photographs her mother would show and tell her were very different to the experience of visiting the same area now as times have moved on. I found this same issue with Jake’s nan, obviously not to the same extent as she is still with us, but when she tells me stories about her childhood and the area she grew up in, and I went to visit it to get a better understanding of her life before I knew her, it was so different to what she had explained to me as times have moved on so there were a lot of modern shops and everything had changed.
I feel my project about Jake’s nan is going to be quite similar to Celine Marchbanks project on her mother except for the obvious that Jake’s nan is still with us and I am looking into her childhood and her current life situations in one project instead of 2. Marchbank has been an incredible inspiration to this project and has really helped me to connect with my boyfriend grandmother and help her to feel some purpose as she finds life very difficult due to her condition.