Dear Mammy… explores the loss of my mother at a young age and the continued search for understanding and acceptance throughout my life. Through fragmented narratives and layered image-making processes, the work reflects the reconstruction of personal history, memory, and identity. The bedroom I grew up in was once my mother’s bedroom. We both grew up in the same space decades apart. Even after she was gone, it often felt as though traces of her remained in the room with me. The dolls house became a symbol of that overlap. It represented inheritance, memory, and the strange intimacy of growing up inside someone else’s past. When my mother was in hospice care, there was a pink dolls house in the hallway outside her room. Every day on the way to visit her, I would beg my dad to let me take it home. Afterwards, I began having recurring dreams about that hallway. Over time, the dolls house became tied to grief, repetition, and the feeling of moving through inherited memory. And as though certain spaces can hold multiple lives at once. The combination of new and archival elements within the project symbolises the tension between presence and absence, demonstrating how memory can feel both vivid and incomplete. Although this project is a deeply personal investigation into my own identity and experiences, it also considers how making can become a way of preserving and reconnecting with memory, as well as a tool for processing and better understanding lived experience.
