When my mother was in the early stage of Alzheimer it was said she had about three years to live, it became thirteen. To spend more time with my mother I decided to go on an art adventure with her for two weeks in 2011. We visited the Amsterdam Art Fair, clayed sculptures, made drawings and did all kind of  things together.

While my mother’s ability to speak became less, I saw an opportunity to find a different way of communicating together through art. She had trouble naming things and found it difficult to remember things. A simple thing as a spoon became a ‘stirring thing’. This I found endlessly fascinating, because I was trying to let go of limiting thoughts in my working process. An important aspect in my work was, and still is, creating and finding things without definition, meaning or naming, while we live in a world where we are constantly labeling things in an attempt to understand things.

A lot of people find it important to own expensive things in order to show off to others and to give themselves a certain kind of status. With this project I wanted to emphasise what is important to me and spend time together with my mother while doing art things together.

For the project we used project space Zoete-Broodjes in Amsterdam as our studio, where we also presented the project at the end of the two weeks. The response of the people was overwhelming and heartwarming.

This project and the illness of my mother has since then been a great influence to my work and I will always cherish her in my ❤️.

Jesper Buursink made a radio reportage (in Dutch) about the project for VPRO Radio. Click HERE to listen to it. 

Reportages of the project were published on Mister Motley and Trendbeheer.