My Master's thesis Louise Snowball, Room #237, is an interactive, multi-sensory installation that draws upon my personal experiences of observing my mother’s progression with dementia. During my visits to her long-term care facility, I documented my mother through photography and videography as a way to process the emotional and psychological trauma involved in this harrowing journey. While spending time with her, I started to contemplate how her diagnosis and institutional environment might have negatively impacted her personhood or sense of identity. I became critical of these types of medical spaces because I felt that my mother was being positioned as an object of her disease, rather than as an autonomous subject. I began to explore how a three-dimensional practice such as installation, could activate the viewer in complex and interactive ways. By using research creation (installation, photography, video, and sound) and auto-ethnography (journaling, drawing, reflexivity) methodologies, I have created an adaptation of my mother’s room in her long-term care facility where viewers can discover narrative "clues”. I evoke my mother’s presence within the installation through the inclusion of personal video and audio clips, texts and projections that the viewer can discover through their interaction with objects. Read my thesis here.
