CARE: The Unspoken Connection

The work has arisen from my experience of training to be a nurse at the Middlesex Hospital, London in the 1970’s and my decision to come off the Nurses and Midwifes Register at the start of the pandemic. I have studied the polarised worlds of my training as a young woman to the images that we were all exposed to of care during the pandemic. The images from high tech intensive care to care workers and families looking after the vulnerable in their own homes or those somewhat beleaguered and isolated care institutions.

As my own professional life as a care giver came to an end, I became very aware of what could be seen as an enormous caven between the now obsolete and historic practices of the 1970’s and the images beamed into our sitting rooms throughout the early days of the pandemic. A unifying and very significant factor being ‘care‘, and that this is the shared human endeavour whether as a parent, unpaid carer, neighbour, professional or student that we share.

Care can be an intensive live saving activity or a simple gesture we are all capable of and can often go unnoticed but probably not by the recipient. A simple act of care is an unspoken connection however fleeting; its significance cannot be underestimated.

Each of us know when the unspoken connection has taken place both as recipients and care giver or sadly when an occasion has been missed or neglected. In this work I have sought to capture a range of such connections. Who is involved, what has, has not or is about to happened is a story the viewer can decide on.

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