I’m So Dissapointed

We didn’t realise my mum was going to die, but we knew this final operation had taken a heavy toll. It was during COVID, so we should have recognised the severity when they allowed both my dad and me to stay as long as we wanted in intensive care. But after so many hospital visits, with my mum always pulling back from the brink, it felt like she might make it again. This time, though, she was on a lot of morphine, and while she drifted in and out of lucidity, she directed her moments of clarity toward me. In between idle talk, she looked at me and said, “I’m so disappointed...”

After she passed, I finally understood what she meant. She knew this was the end of her life, and rather than rage or despair, she summed up her will to live in those simple words: "I’m so disappointed." It was a quiet, profound expression of the life she wasn’t ready to leave behind.

This became the title of my final MA degree show installation. The work was housed in a black room, like the inside of a camera, encapsulating a sense of suspended time. A large photograph of my hand in motion filled the space, accompanied by the sound of my dad breathing—a haunting soundtrack that echoed the life and presence of what remains. In the days after my mum’s death, I often watched him sleep on the sofa, listening intently to his breaths, gripped by a fear that I might lose him too.

Outside the dark room, on a stark white wall, was my memoire—a reflection on seeking presence in art when I had lost it in life. One solitary photograph of a glove was displayed. The glove, which I found in a drawer after my mum passed, was a gift I had given her. She cherished it so much that she had kept the one even after losing its pair. This simple object, sharing both her DNA and mine, symbolised all the times she had held my hand—literally as a child, and metaphorically throughout my adult life.

What lives and what dies in the process of making?