Driving home with a small box of keepsakes in the boot of my car having cleared out my parents’ house – my childhood home – after they passed away, I cried uncontrollably for almost the whole 250-mile journey.

 

When my mother died, I was distraught. The phone call to tell me, the funeral planning, writing the eulogy, choosing the music, was all extremely distressing. But, clearing out my parent’s house (my father having passed away some years earlier) was indescribably awful. The feelings of sorrow, remorse, guilt and loss was simply overwhelming.

 

With a sickening sense of the sheer futility of existence my sister and I picked through a lifetime’s worth of belongings, taking the majority to the local dump. However, as the house emptied, I became fixated on finding a handful objects that I could see in my minds-eye as occupying certain positions on the mantelpiece, or around the house but were no longer there.

 

I searched almost with a sense of panic that if I couldn’t find them perhaps that part of my life had never really existed. No evidence to prove it had happened. When I eventually found many of them, in a box put to one side for charity, I felt such relief at having something tangible to help me make sense of my feelings.

 

My mother's vase

One of the things I salvaged was a rather ugly, thick, vintage glass vase. It probably wasn’t worth anything, but it had always been there and if friends visited and brought her flowers, my mother would put them in this vase.

 

When I broke my mother’s vase – a friend visited me with flowers, and I likewise went to put them in the vase – I wasn’t just distraught or overwhelmed by feelings of loss and remorse. I was utterly inconsolable.

 

In the moment that I accidentally knocked it off the kitchen counter, realising what I had done, watching it fall towards the quarry tiles that I knew would smash it to smithereens, before it even hit the floor I knew. I knew in that nano-second with greater clarity than I had ever known before, the finality of death. That we all die. I am going to die. I am getting older with every breath I breathe and that I would never, ever be the same again as in that moment.

 

The ‘Inheritance’ project is a response to that overwhelming emotion, to grief and irretrievable loss. After destroying the vase, I felt compelled to document the rest of the mementos. The objects themselves prompt personal memories, so after photographing them I began compiling digital compositions, which coupled with short editorial narratives, are unique vignettes of the past.

 

I hope to soon extend the digital series into a body of prints, so watch this space!