“Losing your memory is like watching a bullet in slow-mo for years coming towards you and you can’t avoid it.” That’s one reflection of many from the artist Asbestos in the film Don’t Forget to Remember.
Made with film-maker Ross Killeen, it is about the family’s experience of his mother Helena’s dementia. It was screened this week at the National Gallery of Ireland in advance of a three-day public performance (Friday, Saturday and Sunday, noon-5pm) in which Asbestos slowly erases striking chalk drawings based on family photographs temporarily installed in the education studio at the gallery.
“There are so many conversations I’d love to have had with her and so many things I’d love to have found out about her,” says Asbestos of his mother.
The film, which is interspersed with home videos of family holidays and Asbestos’s street and performance-art practice is, at heart, a love story about his parents.
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The everyday care that his father, Matt O’Dwyer, provides for his wife is beautifully captured in vignettes, including his fruitless attempts to get Helena to help him complete The Irish Times Simplex crossword. Both parents attended the screening. “I can talk with Helena now, but I can’t have a conversation with her,” says Matt.
But there is a stronger message behind the film and the chalk drawings – which Asbestos placed in key places (the Dublin Airport chapel that his parents got married in; on a sea wall on Sandymount Strand near their home; nailed to a wall next to the home Helena grew up in) asking people to add or remove elements of the works with the duster and chalk provided.
“I felt that the art works weren’t finished until they were changed, which is a metaphor for Alzheimer’s disease and how fragile our memories are. We don’t know how much dementia affects someone – whether their memory disappears slightly or entirely,” he explains, as we view the collage of chalk drawings in the education studio, many of which are significantly altered since he first drew them.
Asbestos believes that we often place too much importance on photographs themselves, forgetting to talk about the wider memories of what was happening at the time. “We treat photographs with such reverence and rely too much on the physical manifestation as opposed to the oral history. Getting rid of the memories on these chalk boards doesn’t change what we know collectively about what happened.”
Never afraid to show his emotions or vulnerability in his art practice, he says he found the process cathartic. “The art side of my life suddenly became a form of therapy that isn’t about me. And it’s visceral and contradictory to put emotion into something so personal and want people to destroy it.”
Conversations with his mother are prominent in the film, as are his personal reflections on how in adulthood he became more distant from her. “I don’t think we ever had proper conversations as two grown adults. She was a worrier before she got dementia and ironically appears to be happier now, living purely in the present. Listening to her way of saying things, she is still here,” says Asbestos.
“People look at Alzheimer’s disease as a destruction of the person. People are terrified of it. When they think of themselves and losing their own memories, there is a terror in that. Only with your memories are you able to construct who you are. And as I watch the film again and again, I try to find the humour and silliness in it. Remembering in a holistic way brings more hope.”
The film came about when, towards the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, Killeen and Asbestos met by chance when Asbestos was completing a wall mural on Dublin’s O’Connell Street. Both men began to speak about their family experiences of dementia, realising that they hadn’t really talked to anyone else about it.
“My mum died in 2019 and she had dementia. I realised that neither of us had talked about it or shared our feelings about it,” explains Killeen. Fifteen months later the film was first shown at the 2024 Dublin Film Festival and has since toured all over Ireland.
In it, Matt O’Dwyer speaks openly about the challenges of caring full-time for his wife and how he misses the support he previously received from her. “I’d move mountains if I felt I could do any more. The past is gone. I can’t change that. She’s the love of my life and we’re still here.”
Others too express the sense of guilt, frustration, anger, upset and loss experienced when a family member has dementia. The film was shown as part of the First Fortnight arts and mental health festival.
Caomhán Mac Con Iomaire leads the art and dementia programme at the National Gallery. He says that when people with dementia and their caregivers engage with art works, it gives them a “tremendous sense of wellbeing”.
During the sessions, groups of six to eight people are accompanied through a current exhibition and then offered the chance to draw or paint afterwards. “It’s a very in-the-moment experience and people who have lost the power of speech can create a picture of their first home or something momentous in their life,” explains Sinead Rice, head of education at the National Gallery.
She suggests that art offers people another way to communicate about the highly emotional subject of memory loss that many people find difficult to talk about. “It’s easier to talk about these things, the more we talk about them,” she says.
Making Memories is also the theme of the family drop-in session at the gallery on Sunday. And participants in these intergenerational art workshops will also be invited to witness Asbestos’ work in progress on their visit.
As well as erasing the images on his blackboards, Asbestos will be working with multimedia artist Cian Walker in the gallery throughout the weekend. Together they will re-record a soundscape of audio recordings from the film, placing each in a seven inch vinyl sleeve which forms part of a large image of his mother Helena on the wall.
As the chalk drawings are slowly erased, the soundscape will fade out as another metaphor for the shared loss experienced by families who have a loved one with dementia.
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