All that’s left of you in me
TEMPLE BAR GALLERY 2008
“I had to wipe her nose with a horrid yellow stained tissue that I found in the car.
Only later did I remember it was you spitting out your pills. I realised then that you were going to die soon.”
In a moving and intimate piece of work. Contemporary artist Louise Cherry works in collaboration with her dying father Robin, to produce a temporary decaying suspended sculpture. At the time her father had already been ill for nearly 20 years and at this stage of his illness he could not do normal daily activities without help, he had been in a wheel chair for years and was difficult to understand as his speech had been damaged years before in experimental brain surgery. But somewhere in the wilderness and despair, the pair, father and daughter managed to produce an extraordinary piece of work in which one cannot fail to see and feel the frustration of being caged in a failing body and the immense sadness of loosing a loved one.
Robin was dealing with the lost of his life as he once knew it and Louise describes how she was trying to deal with the loss, which she had felt for years, of her father before he was physically gone. “only one who has experienced what it’s like will understand how it feels to slowly, so very slowly watch a loved one fade away over a period of years. Bit by bit they disintegrate before your eyes……it’s heartbreaking”
The resulting sculpture which hung in Temple Bar Gallery for a week was held together by weight and balance. Over the week various parts of the sculpture changed form; a caged strawberry rotted, a ballon filled with pills, lost its air, a pair of tights filled with sea shells, stretched and a water filled ballon sagged, slowly bit by bit the suspended sculpture moved and swayed in the air. The piece was accompanied by a falling stack of photographs depicting a gallery of life and a video / sound piece of fishing boats leaving the harbour during a dawn chorus, displayed on a vintage video recorder. The fact that the sculpture was dismantled at the end of the week, was taken apart and boxed made the piece even more powerful in relation to a sense of loss.
Overall the piece captured the imagination of the viewer, in which most could relate to in one form or another, life failing us, life falling away and those left picking up the pieces after and attempting to carry on. Louise describes her immense joy at collaborating with her father and accompanying him to the opening of the show. “We both burst with pride for one another”.
Louise’s father Robin Ranson Cherry died of Parkinsons Disease on the 4th June 2009 when Louise was 4 months pregnant with her second child, just 6 months after this work was completed. Robin was cared for throughout his illness by his wife at their family home, where he died peacefully with his family around him.
