I HAD THE PERFECT GRANDMOTHER

My wish to transform my art into something useful was born from my love towards my grandmother on my father's side, Pepita (1916-2009). A chocolate cake you could never have enough of.

She always told us that she prayed at night for all of us. I never saw her get mad at or scold anyone. She loved you for who you were, she made you feel loved and lucky. You felt great by her side. You would feel like hugging her tenderly like you would a child and squeeze her strong. She was positive and above all she was unbelievably funny. She would make you cry with laughter, she was just GREAT.

When my grandfather Nicolas died in 2002, I was shocked to know about the deep and devastating consequences that it brought to her health. Suddenly she lost her will to get up (that had been her dedication to her husband), and sadly she lost that engine that made her keep the daily routines. Because of it, she started losing her memory.

She lost her main reason to be active and she felt lost... Those first weeks I was by her side, it was Christmas and I lived with her until I had to come back to University. Those days with my grandmother are still deeply within me.

I learnt from up close the attachments that we develop with the belongings of a loved one when they leave us and the pain that comes from getting rid of those "useless" things. When we talked, to help her move on and deal with the situation, this topic became really hard.

In the end, the option of giving everything to the church was well received, although actually doing it was heartbreaking, like having to say goodbye to that person all over again. You felt he was present on his clothes, you could constantly see and smell him... To think that you wouldn't ever see something so incorporated into your daily life was really hard to accept. That experience remained deeply engraved in my heart.

The seven years that she continued living with us, until one day she reunited with my grandfather, were full of joy, although we also lived through her memory loss and its consequences... She didn't have Alzheimer's, but she used to forget about things, some of them more important than others, and like that, with a 24/7 caregiver she lived to the last stage of her life.

When she was gone, she was gone A LOT. I didn't want to go when the whole family met in her home to see what everyone would get... it was more than a year later that I dared to go and enter her home, almost unrecognizable, looking for a memento with her smell. And it was then, just before selling the home, walking the lonely and lighted rooms when I felt inspired and visualized Memoryarte: the solution to always keep her close and on sight in a personal and discreet way. I thought of making a picture of her made with some of her clothes with her smell on it and with small objects that could bring me vivid memories with her, to make them last in my memory and avoid their fading through time.

I remember that there were almost no clothes or objects left in the home, and the beautiful old furniture had left in her absence marks already empty that reminded of a life full of smiles that wouldn�t be repeated with the same characters. But I found something... I made the painting, and it is now the most valuable artwork to me, a tangible piece of her memory.

Working on my grandmother's Memoryarte, I thought a lot that I would've loved to make that portrait with her, and while thinking of it, I remembered her memory loss and I told myself: "if I had this idea before...", I could have made Memoryartes of her loved ones (with clothes and objects that brought her memories of each of them) to check if when she looked, smelled them she could remember her family even with her most weakened memory. What if the paintings could have helped her remember?...

And, even if I couldn't give her the opportunity to try to make a Memoryarte to remember, I thought that there were a lot of people that I could help with this idea. Offering it for free to selected volunteers for research projects of Alzheimer's and checking if the tool is effective to help them remember their loved ones.

My biggest motivation that drives me to investigate it is the immense happiness that you feel when helping someone remember a happy experience, especially in Alzheimer's cases.

Memoryarte is a way to transform those things that bring memories to us into personal and intimate artworks, and this way ensure that those visual memories don't end up in a box inside a wardrobe or like many times, in the garbage because of not knowing what to do with them.