Search
Jane
Jul 16, 2023
A beautiful life of a cup of tea
16.7.23 (filmed in 2022) It's always a treat to bring mum her morning tea - her face lights up to greet the new day. It's also a good...
Som Chai meets my family & friends
I am so excited that Som Chai is now in Oz and has been granted a partner visa.
He's met my family and friends, and even come along to Uni with me.
It is wonderful having him here with me - no more lonely nights or awkward outings on my own!
I can throw my wish list in the fire now because he fulfils all my dreams. I am so proud of him - he is charismatic, generous and kind, and he is also Budhist and a meditator!
I wondered whether there was a difference between art made by a human and art made by a machine? So I made a fan that painted, and I became a painting human fan.
Conclusion: there was no difference.
Just an Ordinary Peasant is based on my uncle’s experience as an inmate at Treblinka extermination camp in 1944. His memoir recounts that while being forced to carry corpses from the gas chambers to an open-air pyre, he was handed a sack which held little children who were still alive. The guard commanded the sack be thrown into the fire. The woman I play in Just an Ordinary Peasant is a hybrid character created from the memoirs of my uncle, my parents and my own research. She sings and dances and also throws a sack of babies into the fire. This piece explores my own biases as well as questions the culpability of ‘ordinary people’ who were accomplices to the atrocities carried out during the Third Reich.
According to mum’s passport she turned 100 on 28.10.24 , but according to the Lodz Ghetto records she is 101. Till not long ago mum had lived a rich and vibrant life despite living through that dark, terrible war and its aftermath.
In 2017, after dad died, she made the decision to move in with me. Instead of feeling burdened, I embraced the change and the opportunity to care for her.
These posts capture mum’s life since she moved in. These were precious years when she lived in my ‘share home’ together with other family members and housemates. Everyone supported, appreciated and loved having her around.
Many of us are not connected to the lives of the very old. I wanted to documents these years with mum as a record for the generations to come and anyone else who might be interested. These posts reveal the daily joys and challenges of caring for a loved one with dementia.
Mum began having more and more falls and in 2022, after 5 years of living with me, she moved into the Aged Care facility across the road. I was very sad that I could no longer care for her at home.
Even though her world today is small and contained, I can see that she is content in her little room as long as we, her family, visit her regularly, spend time with her, and above all, she feels our love for her.
I have continued to document the ups and downs of mum’s world while she’s at the facility.
These posts also include many inspiring stories from mum’s earlier years - pre, during and post Holocaust. They are a reminder that mum hasn’t always been old and are a tribute to her spirit and momentous life.