Saudade:
a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves.
Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return
Saudade is a project about my grandmother during her descent into Alzheimer's. I worked on this in 2015, during the last few months of her life. Its original format is in book form, a video of my handmade book can be seen within the carrousel above, and was meant to tell a story of the life and memory of my grandmother. The book features scanned loved letters between herself and my grandfather when he was over seas. These letters were first found after my grandfather’s death in 2011 as we cleaned out their home and moved her to an assisted living apartment. I fell in love with their love and the purity of the objects and her memory and the memory of her. I found old photographs of her and my grandfather on their journey through life together and juxtaposed them with the “present” images. This series was therapy for myself for dealing with her fight with the disease and also a way for me to make sure that she and my grandparent’s love didn’t fade away.