During her time as a resident at The Growlery, Anna Heywood-Jones is creating works in response to her father’s experience of living with Alzheimer’s disease, a slow and incrementally devastating illness. Through text and image-based articulations, she is exploring forms of collaboration with her father, with both his current and former selves. She is also interested in repetitive gestures as a method of meaning-making. By using structures found in rope-making, knotting and looping processes she attempts to give form to chaos, to measure the immeasurable. These works-in-progress are part of an ongoing project, one which the artist revisits periodically to acknowledge, witness and make sense of the process of transformation that her father is going through. 

“My more immediate purpose is to suggest that in a world where things are continually coming into being through processes of growth and movement – that is, in a world of life – knotting is the fundamental principle of coherence. It is the way forms are held together and kept in place within what would otherwise be a formless and inchoate flux.” 

Tim Ingold 
The Life of Lines