I am unravelling my family. For most of my life, I saw my mother as a victim of my father’s control and violence. As I began looking at what remained, I realised I had never seen the whole picture.
I don’t know exactly how my father died. My mother says she doesn’t remember. My mother, who now has dementia, holds part of the story, but she is an unreliable witness.
A History of Vanishing is a personal investigation, piecing together fragments of the past through photographs, letters, diaries and family objects. Moving between evidence and imagination, my photography explores memory, domestic abuse and the stories families choose not to tell. The work is a search, questioning what remains when answers are out of reach. (Ongoing).
December 14th 2019
I don't know exactly where my father died—my mother says she doesn’t remember. The hospital told us it was a heart attack. He collapsed at home. But his body told a different story. The coroner’s report later noted three long deep cuts on his forehead. I saw bruising on his neck. The police asked us to wait in a room while they examined him.
Back at my parents’ house, I cleaned up—so much blood. I searched for whatever he’d struck, the object that split his head, so I could wipe that clean too. The coffee table? The mantelpiece? It took six weeks to find the stains—dull red, dried hard—on a childish nostalgic figurine, a lute on its back, a book in hand: an idealised childhood, stained like the secrets we lived with.
My dog refused to enter, always lying on the threshold as if he knew a presence remained. My daughter said,
“The blood is all over.”
I protested, “But I scrubbed and bleached it.”
My daughter added, “I can still see it.”
I protested, “But I scrubbed and bleached it.”
My daughter added, “I can still see it.”
I return to what remains. The documents, photos, diaries—each one a clue leading to a different version of events. There is a wound in this story—one that refuses to heal. The true story of my father’s death is something I may never understand. And yet, I keep looking, searching for the thread that might tie it all together. The faded marks on the wall are still there, waiting to be deciphered. Someone tried to erase them—but they left traces.
The Cause of Dementia
My mother has dementia. Her mother did too, and my father’s grandmother. If the women in my family were deeply unhappy, did they need to forget? If your choices brought you shame, if change felt impossible—what might the brain do then? Can whisky and denial wear away the frontal lobes? Can you train your neural pathways to bury the past, until one day those paths collapse and die?
A portrait may offer a glimpse of the soul and tell part of a story. I must create my mother’s portrait. But I’m afraid of what it might reveal.
Crime Scene or Accident?
I had always positioned my mother as a victim of my father’s control and violence. But had I seen the full picture? Could the birth certificates, the woods, and the old holiday house provide clues? Each image is a piece of the puzzle—an attempt to reconstruct what was never spoken. The truth is fractured. This is not just about memory loss, but about concealed histories within a family.
Motive
Coercive control isn’t just about violence—it’s about domination. My father ruled through silence, through moods that shaped the atmosphere of the house. We learned to anticipate his needs before he voiced them. We knew when to disappear. School, the stables, and the woods became our sanctuaries. At home, we sought permission just to exist in his space. He isolated us—making the outside world feel unsafe. Friends weren’t welcome. If he earned the money and owned the house, he believed he had the right to dictate everything. I wonder if, one day, my mother simply couldn’t take any more. Years of denial had not made the past disappear. Perhaps it was still there, waiting.
A voice whispers, 'But she isn’t a good person either, is she?'
Blood Traces
My parents had a troubled marriage. I told the police at the hospital about the coercion, the financial control. They asked about physical violence. My mother said she’d once been in A&E after a fight and told the nurse she had tripped. The nurse didn’t believe her. We moved to a detached house. It allowed his rages to continue. An Englishman’s home is his castle.
In our family, we had myths—carefully maintained narratives. What would happen if I broke the silence and documented what I imagine happened the night my father died? I do not think it was a simple heart attack. To make sense of it, I need to examine the narrative arc of their relationship.
The War
Perhaps the roots lie there—in inherited wounds. My father was an only child. His mother, Alice, a gentle woman from Derbyshire, knew all the country names for flowers. She was my safe place. With her, I spent long days in the horse fields. She seemed to calm him. I was thirteen when she died.
After that, he changed. He began to shape himself in the image of his own father—the man he had once resented, now rewritten as a hero. “The war changed him,” my father would say. But he never knew the man before the war.
He abandoned birdwatching and became a man obsessed with cars and control. He bought a new one every nine months and washed it twice a day, as though the gleaming surface was the only thing he could truly manage.
His grandfather had belonged to a men-only club. His great-grandfather was a Mason in Karachi, my grandfather collected Nazi war trophies, the spears from the Boer war hung in our living room. In the family box of birth certificates and wills, I saw a pattern—a lineage built on secrecy and dominance. They passed down a cigar box from man to man, topped with a captive bear that danced when the key was turned.
Background Check
My mother was not wanted by her own mother. We don’t know for certain who her father was. Her mother, Marion, fell for one man, married another, then divorced him and returned to her first love—Alec. She adored him. He was dangerous.
The relationship between Marion and Alec was complex. Did she fear him, or was she complicit? He wore dresses in private. He abused children. She seemed to protect him. My sister and I have a nickname for them—“Fred and Rosemary.”
My family buried their secrets in suburban gardens, behind roses and carefully chosen outfits. It’s little wonder my mother didn’t know how to parent. She didn’t touch, play, or listen. She detached. If I spoke about the abuse happening under her roof, she punished me.
So, do I think my mother was a victim? I do. But she also waged her own war. A person can be both harmed and harmful. She once told me she’d have left if she had money or a career. I asked a friend of theirs recently if she was a victim. “No,” he said. “She was strong. Always held her own.”
If only she would speak before she forgets who I am.
The Woman Who Studied Murder
My mother always insisted she’d had a good life. She spoke proudly of her status—cars, jewellery, fur coats, holidays—an image carefully constructed and fiercely protected. But inside our home, she was someone else entirely.
Confrontational, perhaps narcissistic. A woman who denied truth, even to herself. She ignored the wider abuse in the family, looked away from anything that didn’t fit her version of events. Omission was her weapon. She read murder novels obsessively. How to commit the perfect crime. How to erase evidence.
After my father died—suddenly, at home—she said she didn’t remember what happened. I believed her. For a while.
These are the stones from which my story grows. It’s told in fragments: portraits, heirlooms, faded marks on the wall, and things meant to be erased. It explores the fine line between forgetting and concealment, between memory loss and lifelong manipulation.
I don’t know what really happened the night my father died. I have stopped looking. The myths that shaped our family are beginning to collapse. This is a journey of unearthing.
I return to the wall where the stain once was. It’s faded now. But in the right light, you can still see it. Some marks refuse to vanish.
Exhibition views are visual mock-ups, illustrating a possible presentation of the work.
Left: a 1980s domestic living-room set, patterned wallpaper, an armchair, rug and coffee table. Family photographs hang directly on the wallpaper in mismatched frames.
Centre two walls: a separate white gallery wall displaying new artworks, with considered spacing and proper framing.
Right: the glass-topped museum display cabinet, holding a small selection of artefacts.
