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Kim Plowright on caring for parents with dementia
15 Plays8 days ago
Meet Kim Plowright, whose life was slowly absorbed and reshaped by caring for her parents, both of whom developed dementia.
Her father was diagnosed first, and Kim found herself trying to problem-solve his slow erasure before her mother was also eventually diagnosed. Years followed of chaos, repetitive routines and conversations, boredom, frustration and fear — and sometimes violence. Much of it fell to Kim, as an only child, alongside her partner.
Social media provided a way of coping, offering space for the dark humour needed to survive the intense emotional pressure of caring for two people while holding down a demanding career.
After both her parents died in 2015, within six months of each other, Kim recalibrated by taking time out from her career in digital — a year she is still taking. She found her way back to art, which she had studied at Oxford University. What began with online drawing sessions led her back into classrooms and studios, and eventually into teaching.
Almost by accident, Kim became a drawing tutor, running life drawing, portrait and creative classes in community settings. When funding cuts closed those courses, she set up her own life drawing class, creating a safe space where people have permission to try, fail and challenge themselves.
This is a story about the realities of caring, and how creativity can help rebuild a sense of self after everything else has fallen away.
Music: Morning Span provided by Mobygratis #mobygratis
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Transcript
Introduction to Kim's Journey
00:00:01
Speaker
Meet Kim, whose life was slowly absorbed and reshaped by caring for her parents, both of whom developed dementia. Her father was diagnosed first and Kim found herself trying to problem solve his slow erasure before her mother was also eventually diagnosed.
00:00:18
Speaker
Years followed of chaos, repetitive routines and conversations, boredom, frustration and fear and sometimes violence. Much of it fell to Kim as an only child alongside her partner.
00:00:31
Speaker
Social media provided a way of coping, offering space for the dark humour needed to survive the intense emotional pressure of caring for two people while holding down a demanding career.
00:00:43
Speaker
After both her parents died in 2015, within six months of each other, Kim recalibrated by taking time out from her career in digital. She found her way back to art, which she'd studied at Oxford University, and what began with online drawing sessions led her back into classrooms and studios and eventually into teaching.
00:01:04
Speaker
Almost by accident, Kim became a drawing tutor, running life drawing, portrait and creative classes in community settings. When Funding Cuts closed these courses, she set up her own life drawing class, creating a safe space where people have permission to try, fail and challenge themselves.
00:01:23
Speaker
This is a story about the realities of caring and how creativity can help rebuild a sense of self after everything else has fallen away.
Beginning of Dementia Journey: Recognizing the Signs
00:01:32
Speaker
Welcome, Kim. Thanks for joining me on the podcast. We're here today to talk a little bit about your experience caring for your parents who both had dementia. When did you realise something was going wrong? I think it was with your father first, wasn't it?
00:01:48
Speaker
Yeah, it was. So, know, they both died with dementia. And dementia is one of those things that, you know, it takes a long time. It's got a long old prognosis. And most people, you know, from diagnosis to dying is seven years, 10 years, sometimes 15.
00:02:06
Speaker
So it is, it's a marathon, not a sprint when you're caring for people with Alzheimer's and dementias. The point at which it really kind of kicked off was around...
00:02:17
Speaker
Maybe 2000, 2002. It was very early in the kind of of just post-millennium. And my dad came to stay with me and my best mate in London. We were kind of doing up a house in Peckham together at the time. And they are very subtle things that you first start noticing. And they're kind of just these little sort of behavioural changes or somebody just gets kind of more themself or just, you know, more ornery or more difficult. And he came up to stay for a few days. He was mostly cootling around in the garden for us. But yeah, I went off to work one day and came back and he hadn't eaten. And it was like, oh, I couldn't work out how to get myself lunch. And well, I'd left stuff in the fridge and he could have made himself a sandwich. But it was little funny things like that. Things that you'd think somebody would be competent to do or that seemed really straightforward suddenly wouldn't happen.
Navigating Care Systems and Managing Relationships
00:03:08
Speaker
a year or two later, him and my mum and my mum's best mate came to stay in flat I was in.
00:03:13
Speaker
And whilst I went off on holiday and my mum's best mate, Brenda, was like, oh, it was it was really odd because he suddenly couldn't read a map. And he'd been somebody who was really good at that kind of thing, you know, spatially aware, always knew where he was. And suddenly um and you don't really realise until you're looking back that no, that that is the first sign of something going really wrong. And, you know, it really is like a a slow cooker thing, like, you know, the the old boiling of frog that you don't notice until you're a long way into the process and things are really wrong.
00:03:43
Speaker
You were an only child trying to manage that with your dad and then it also began to happen with your mum. How did it all come about that you realised they were both struggling?
00:03:55
Speaker
Yeah. i mean, it was a long time. You know, the the first signs were early 2000s and it was 2015 was the year that I lost both of them very quickly, you know, within six months of each other.
00:04:10
Speaker
So really, it was 15 years, that interim period. It was a long old thing. And it wasn't just my mum and dad in that time. It was my partner's mum was sick as well. She'd had multiple strokes and she broke a hip a couple of times. She was in and out of hospital. I lost a baby in that period as well. So it was a marathon. It was a really long period of hair.
00:04:35
Speaker
It was a a good decade of just this constant up and down to Canterbury every weekend, up and down to Derby. It was fairly relentless. But you you settle into it and you get used to it because there isn't anything else that you're going to do, right? You don't get to say no or I can't. You just kind of carry on and do the best you can. And my partner was incredibly supportive. We held each other through it, really. You just, you do what you have to do with these circumstances.
00:05:04
Speaker
When he got diagnosed, we managed to get support. So there is like a local... age concern that has ah a dementia care unit and he got a day placement there then as soon as mum and dad were on their radar they have amazing people whose job it is to stitch together the weird patchwork of care because the you know the kind of between the nhs and various you know hospital and gp and yada yada yada It's not particularly joined up. I also mean, you know, social services and benefits and stuff like that.
00:05:40
Speaker
You know, nobody goes, all right, this is the thing. So you need to do this, this, this and this and this and this person will talk to this person. It is just a weird mishmash of bits and bobs in different places where you can get support. And actually navigating that is really hard.
00:05:56
Speaker
But Age UK and also Admiral Nurses who are dementia specialists, they understand this landscape and they can explain to
Coping Mechanisms and Mental Toll
00:06:04
Speaker
you, go here for this, go there for that, do this, do that. So there are people who will step in and help you stitch this together and support you. It was mostly aimed at my mum.
00:06:14
Speaker
So, you know, she was... taken to carers events and given the information and then I would have to glean from her what she'd been told and that got harder as things went on because obviously we didn't realise but she was cognitively declining as well so I spent a lot of time you know writing lists with her and stitching together what she'd been told and then the combination of that and her being quite controlling made that a bit more challenging than it could be.
00:06:40
Speaker
When my nan had dementia, so it also drawn out after a series of strokes, help was hard to find. She had carers who came in a few times a day, get her up, make her breakfast, get her dressed, make her dinner. But she was on her own.
00:06:59
Speaker
granddad had died at that point. for long periods of time. And she felt really struggled with that. So she was phoning us constantly. She also had macular degeneration, so she couldn't see anything. And it was just,
00:07:11
Speaker
heartbreaking and I don't think we were very patient. I wish we'd been more patient when I think back, but it's so hard when you're in the thick of it. What was it like for you? i think I learned patience.
00:07:24
Speaker
So there were times when it was totally mentalising. You know, my mum and I had quite a confrontational complex relationship. so we were often not fighting but we're both unstoppable force and immovable object so we'd just be pushing against each other a lot it's hard it's confusing it's really illogical as well and just the the craziness you're just like what what I don't understand ru but after a while I realized that going with it made things easier so there's a book called Contented Dementia that think somebody recommended to me. And I'm not sure that I'd go in 100% in the whole theory of the book. But one of the things that it espouses is this idea that because that person's concept of what is going on with the world is correct to them, if you try and countermand that, it's
00:08:19
Speaker
It just makes things worse. It confuses them. You know, they start doubting, you end up in conflict. So understanding that one of the best things that I could do was, you know, if craziness was happening, you kind of went, oh, you came alongside, you stayed in their world, and then you gently deflected them away from it. So it was, you know, like if my dad was insisting that he could see black shapes in the air floating, you...
00:08:45
Speaker
didn't say, no, you can't, don't be silly, you're imagining things. You would go, oh, that sounds that sound difficult. Hang on, why don't I sit next to you and we can sweep them away together? So you'd find ways of being with and solving the problem in their reality rather than yours. And i mean, that was hard and weird, but it seemed to work.
00:09:08
Speaker
I think that is amazing because that's definitely something i really struggled doing with my nan, she would often see people queuing outside the toilet and she would talk to her dead relatives. And I would sometimes be there on my own. I'd feel really freaked out. And it's almost for yourself that you're saying there's no one there because part me was like, maybe there is. And she really can see dead people and I can't. And I used to be quite worried about it. But when I worked for the NHS helping launch dementia cafes, that's when I realised about what you're saying, that just going with the flow, agreeing with what they're agreeing makes them much less stressed than trying to go against the grain, even though your brain wants to be logical to stay in your own logical reality. It's so
Challenges and Support Networks
00:09:59
Speaker
hard. Yeah, and it it is. It's really tough to let go of that. it's It's so hard. It's other things as well. So my dad had quite a lot of repetition. He'd ask the same question again and again and again. And it was always, how old am I?
00:10:11
Speaker
How old am I? And you'd tell him, you know, you're 87. And then he'd rhyme. he did He did a lot of this thing called clanging, which was, you know, you take a word and you rhyme it and you kind of repetitive speech patterns.
00:10:25
Speaker
So it would always be, oh, 87, you know, near to heaven or 88, it's guessing late. you know, 86 and up to my tricks. It was e every time. And he was asking this 10, 15 times an hour. Every couple of minutes, he'd ask the same question.
00:10:42
Speaker
And you'd go through this kind of ritual of repetition. You'd tell him, he'd repeat it back, and then there'd be pause, and then he'd ask, and you'd tell him, and he'd repeat it back. and so on Initially, you'd go a bit insane.
00:10:53
Speaker
You know, this is stop asking me that. But then I suddenly realised that it was... kind of like a bid for connection and that if you treated it as if it were like a a rosary or a catechism or like a you know just ah a thing that you did because it was felt good to repeat it suddenly you could turn it into something that was reassuring and that it felt like a way of being close yeah so it's a lot of little tricks like that that you have to kind of decide not to go insane yourself
00:11:28
Speaker
But to welcome in enough insanity, it becomes okay to cope with. Because, yeah, I mean, my mum saw people, my dad saw animals. Sometimes it can be really distressing.
00:11:39
Speaker
And letting that panic subside, it takes some doing. but And you used Twitter at the time. Social media is a very different place to what it is now. But I remember following your caring journey on Twitter and you used it with let off steam, I think, but what did you not share or what did you choose to share or was it free flowing really?
00:12:05
Speaker
So, i mean, I'd always really kind of used Twitter as like a just, you know, blurting. And I think, you know, the same for like, you this is just what's on my mind and and I'll just externalise this thought. and I think it's almost like writing notes to self or you know, I'd find something morbidly funny. So I would make a joke out of it Actually, that humour became really important because when you're in this slightly insane place, quite often I'd spend sort of weeks,
00:12:34
Speaker
caring for my dad solo, you know, you get quite caught up in it. So finding kind of little outlets becomes really important. And and one of the the big things as well was, you know, I'd come down and my mum would need to go to the supermarket.
00:12:49
Speaker
So we'd, you know, get in the car and go down. And it's amazing how long kind of... lady in her early 80s can take going around Sainsbury's squeezing all of the the bread and complaining about the price of beans and it would take her like an hour and a half two hours to do the circuit of the shop and you'd have to take the same route every time and you'd have the same conversations and you'd just be going nuts and so documenting it and turning it into um a performance like through twitter became a really important way of
00:13:21
Speaker
me venting outwards so that I wasn't getting upset with her. I think she would have been mortified if she realised what I was doing. She'd be furious. But it was the thing that kind of kept me sane. And it also meant that friends knew what was going on as well, that kind of ambient intimacy that you get. You know, you obviously...
00:13:42
Speaker
really only know me through that kind of thing yeah and I had other people who would check in and became a way people would know what was going on without you specifically having to have that conversation over and over again just I think because I was going through something similar but less as direct as you being the only soul carer I was the granddaughter so it wasn't so on me as other members of my family, but the frustration, the confusion and the panic of losing someone slowly, but sometimes it was quite violent or with emergency moments, you were living it too.
00:14:23
Speaker
It was helpful. Yeah, and it's been really those emergency moments and the panic. No matter how much you read up or are told, you you can never quite prepare yourself for those. But having that secondary outlet is really important, that sense that you had people who knew about it and you know would take you to the pub when they next saw you. To have an invisible care system behind you can be really valuable.
00:14:49
Speaker
It was refreshing as well about how boring it can be caring for somebody and uncomfortable. Because, you know, often in a caring role, you're trying to be Florence Nightingale, the hero of the hour. But like you said, it's repetitive going around Sainsbury's for two hours over and over being asked the same question. It does feel like you're losing the essence of yourself at the same time.
00:15:14
Speaker
You know, how did you manage to deal with your own peace of mind? I'm not sure that I did. You know, I think a lot of it was just like, I was just running into it headlong.
00:15:27
Speaker
And I'd find ways to distract myself. So, i mean, I was working at quite a high level doing really intense projects. So I would be doing, you know, digital projects for, you know, big broadcasters and stuff like that. And just being able to overwork myself when I wasn't caring became really important. But it would also mean that like, you know, that sense of panic. Even now, 10 years later, i find it very hard to ignore my phone if it's ringing, because you would be in the middle of an open plan office producing the hell out of something. And then suddenly you'd have to have one of those very loud conversations. Have you got your hearing aids in, mum? What's the matter? can you hear Can you hear me? Suddenly talking down an old person who was having a flap about almost always something really trivial. yeah In retrospect, you know, my mum was a very anxious person as well.
00:16:21
Speaker
And the kind of the anxiety was it got turned up. by the dementia. Having things to lose myself in became important. I spent a lot of time playing computer games. yeah um you know I used to come down and to give my mum a break, she'd go and stay with a friend and I would care for dad for a week, which wasn't horrific. you know He wasn't wandering. He was quite sedentary. he just left him in a chair and gave him sandwiches at regular intervals.
00:16:50
Speaker
And I would do stuff like playing Minecraft to something mindless that you can completely lose yourself in. And there was a moment when I walked into the garage and needed to turn on the light. And instead of like automatically reaching up and hitting the light switch, which I can do without thinking about, because, you know, I've known this house for 40 years. I realised that I'd twitched the fingers that were bound to the keys to drop a torch on the wall in Minecraft. So it is like those where the thing that you were doing to kind of occupy yourself, possibly a little bit too much.
Final Months and Reflections on Loss
00:17:26
Speaker
That's funny. And what about your father and mother's sort final moments? Can you explain a little bit more about what happened? Yeah. So it was really, the end was both kind of sudden and inevitable and complicated, really untidy. Yeah. So things have been getting more and more intense. You know, the course of the disease doesn't go linearly. You don't slowly get worse. you You stay the same for a bit and then you drop and suddenly everything gets complicated. And, you know, then you never recover from that place that you've dropped to and then you drop again. So sudden crises and then recalibrating in the middle.
00:18:04
Speaker
And my mum had got... her full diagnosis in like the January of 2015 so it was only about six months before she actually died and things were getting kind of more and more difficult for her she was struggling to cope we were having to put in more care around her but then one morning I got a phone call phone calls at 7am never a good sign never a good sign good sign blearily picked up the phone and it was the carer who's like, your dad's attacked your mum.
00:18:37
Speaker
um You know, the police are on their way. Don't panic. You know, they're OK. But I thought I'd let you know. So obviously you jump in the car and you drive to Canterbury. What had happened is they'd been trying to get ready and my mum had pushed and my dad had got angry and he had thrown a dustpan and brush at her and the dustpan cut her head open. So there was, you know, lots of drama, lots of blood, very little actual injury.
00:19:02
Speaker
But because this was, you know, the carer saw it, so she had to safeguarding responsibilities, so she had to report it, so the police were called. the police turned up well you know this is we can see what's going on here we're not going to prosecute anybody but it meant that that triggered social services so my dad got put into emergency respite care to give my mum a break two weeks into that my mum fell whilst walking the dog and broke her neck so my dad is in ah an emergency home my mum is in hospital awaiting serious op put her back together basically. I i didn't realise quite how serious it was until I saw her scan. She's really lucky that she didn't die on the spot. She was two millimetres away from being paralysed. Yeah, suddenly we go into this absolute crisis phase. My mum either in emergency neurocare in King's, my dad slowly getting used to being in a home, but he wasn't very present at that point. Me looking after their dog, who also instantly gets sick and has to be put into the veterinary hospital. So I'm driving around like three different bits of Kent trying to kind of coordinate everything.
00:20:07
Speaker
And my mum pulled through. She had a 10-hour operation. She was walking again. She was in a nursing home and recovering, but she refused to eat and she lost maybe half her body weight. wow Wow. Really struggling to get her to engage. She got so angry. And then again, one morning, seven o'clock, my phone goes and it was a really distressed nurse in the nursing home just going, you know, your mum is sick. We think she might have had a heart attack. Should we resuscitate?
00:20:39
Speaker
And I was like, I didn't know what to say, but obviously, you know, you jump in the car and you drive and she had died by the time we got there. She had a pulmonary embolism. So, you know, this was somebody who'd survived a broken neck, massive surgery, and then it caught up with her.
00:20:55
Speaker
It was a couple of months later, actually. Then my dad stayed in the home. He had a fall, broke his hip towards the October, ended up in hospital.
00:21:05
Speaker
It was really ah tricky. I got a phone call one day saying, where are you? You're meant to be in a meeting. i was like, what meeting? Oh, it's your dad's care assessment. I was like, what? what nobody's Nobody said anything to me about this. And it was like, OK, well, come in as soon as you can.
00:21:21
Speaker
Sit down and kind of going through all of the assessment for whether he was eligible for ongoing NHS care. And it's things like, you know, is he violent? Can he feed himself? And at the time he was doubly incontinent. He couldn't turn himself over in bed, let alone dress. He couldn't feed himself. He was barely eating. he could barely talk. And he wasn't serious enough for NHS ongoing care. And they ran me up.
00:21:47
Speaker
it's It's nuts. It's absolutely nuts. but I don't think I talked to a consultant or anybody responsible for his care at all in the couple of months he was in hospital. And they rang me up ah to say, oh no, he's he's not eligible. But they rang me up about four hours after he'd actually died.
00:22:03
Speaker
He just died one morning. And again, i wasn't there. And I think my regret with both of them is that I couldn't be there with them as they died. They both died alone, which is I still feel really sad about that.
00:22:18
Speaker
I feel that sometimes that is a choice of theirs. My granddad passed away. We'd been by his bedside for weeks. We had cancer. We went and we were like, let's go and get some chips with Wibby Quick.
00:22:32
Speaker
And he died. In that tiny moment, we were all away. It's almost like, you won't leave me alone. i just want to do it by myself. So he did. eoff and Yeah, I think it's common. you know, I've heard this from people who are involved in hospice care, that actually there is that moment that they wait until everybody goes away and then that's when it happens.
00:22:56
Speaker
But you were with them for the majority of their illness, which... It's really big deal. Yeah, but you you still come out of it going, I didn't do enough. I could have done more. i could have planned better. There are still times when I really, i feel that quite strongly.
00:23:13
Speaker
Again, I think this is probably more to do with my relationship with my mum. Yes.
Career Transition and Rediscovering Art
00:23:18
Speaker
Just you haven't tried hard enough, Kimmy. Yeah. I think, I mean, I'd say almost from the outside, it looked like you tried so hard and it had quite a profound impact on your personal life, your your professional life. And how did that all change?
00:23:38
Speaker
you know, after your parents passed away. So they died in 2015. 2013, I produced a massive project that won loads of awards, digital thing for Channel 4, an indie production company, working at a really high level. And came out of the back of that, was a little bit like, that was a lot.
00:24:00
Speaker
And so took a ah decision to dial down the amount that I was working, took a ah part-time teaching role, like very deliberately kind of dial back on my freelancing commitments. Luckily, just in time, because I didn't realise that I was 18 months away from everything going completely crazy.
00:24:17
Speaker
And then i kind of continued with the teaching yeah a bit after that. kind of you know I spent most of 2015 with my ears ringing. I don't really have many memories of that summer. I have kind of snapshots, but really grief and stress really mess with your recall.
00:24:35
Speaker
I continued teaching in the following year, just minimal amounts to keep me going. I took a nine to five job, something that wasn't kind of tremendously complicated, a bit of product management role, running ah a corporate website. This turned out to be a terrible error.
00:24:52
Speaker
i I accidentally picked the most kind of little p political, invitee, backstabbing organisation to work in have now come to the conclusion that I should never work in big organisations. I'm not one of those people.
00:25:06
Speaker
I don't have good enough theory of mind to to deal with corporate politics. Did that job for about a little bit over a year and then got off the train one morning commuting into work. and just suddenly realised that I felt thought I was going to throw up on the platform at St Pancras. And I think that made me go, oh this is wrong. This is really wrong. Yeah, I'd say that's a clue. I decided to hand in my notice. So I said, OK, I'm going to give myself a year off. I'm an only child. I inherited the house that I grew up in, which is, you know, privilege, but comes with a lot of other stuff as well. So suddenly i didn't need to be earning masses because I wasn't didn't have a mortgage. I wasn't paying rent.
00:25:49
Speaker
So I was like, well, why don't I take a year out? I think I've possibly earned it. But that was... We're getting on for seven years ago now that I decided this and I'm still sort of never gone back to it. I started doing things like going to drawing classes, you know, picking up stuff that I had cared about previously, little bits of freelance work just to keep me tied in over, picked up my own creative practice as well. On your Instagram, suddenly there were faces appearing, really delicate drawings of faces And I didn't realise you'd actually gone to art college and the digital part is the only part of you that I knew.
00:26:32
Speaker
this was like a revelation, but it was actually quite a core part of your whole... seeing Yeah, I guess so. I mean, i did ah an art degree in the mid 90s. And actually, I was incredibly educationally hothoused in my teens, I went to a very kind of high pressure academic school, and pushed into applying to Oxbridge.
00:26:55
Speaker
And did three science A levels was applying for um biology, zoology degrees. you know, was doing what was expected of me. and But I'm not giving up art, I'm keeping my art going as well. I kind of negotiated with my dad at the time to allow me to take a year out and do a foundation.
00:27:16
Speaker
Yeah. So which was kind of a big deal because my dad grew up in Oxford. He's a working class lad, divorced parents in the 1930s, left school at 14, mad about science, taught himself degree level chemistry, ended up running a university chemistry department, the logistics side rather than the professional services side. So he was very much a self-made man.
00:27:37
Speaker
And he just really wanted his little girl to go to Oxford. So my grandmother being a cleaner at Magdalen College, He had worked for the university as like a junior lab boy, and he just wanted me to go to Oxford.
00:27:51
Speaker
So I applied and was not accepted for zoology. And he didn't speak to me for three days. He was so disappointed. how Which is pretty bad. But when you realise that I got the rejection letter the day before Christmas. He had a great Christmas.
00:28:08
Speaker
yeah I had this kind of weird, you know, huge expectations on me. When I did the foundation year, love and towards the end of that, a tutor at Canterbury Art College, Kayad as was, kind of pulled me aside one day and went, you don't want to go and do this psychology degree, do you? i was like, no, not really. I want to do art.
00:28:25
Speaker
And he's like, well, okay, let me pull your folks aside. oh And he did this guy, Jack Esterhausen, pulled my dad aside, went, she's really good. She's good enough to get into Oxford. And at that point, it unlocked permission for me. And I ended up going to the Ruskin. But felt at the end of my degree that I somehow didn't have this thing, that I looked around people in my year, these guys who had this confidence, and they were artists. They just knew what they were doing. And it's only now that I realise that what they actually had was trust funds. LAUGHTER Yeah. That they have the security. The same for journalism as well. Yeah, exactly.
00:29:02
Speaker
yeah So I did my degree and was interested in filmmaking and ended up going and doing a ah master's in video production and then ended up in the media after that. So I stepped away from my art practice, essentially, having fought for it. I just like, oh, I'm not good enough. I'll i'll go and do something different.
00:29:21
Speaker
The imposter syndrome is a thing that women particularly carry, like job descriptions. And unless you're ticking 90%, you won't apply. And I think it's something like a man only needs about 30% and they'll still apply. Like there's definitely a real discrepancy of we mean business when we say we can do it, we have to mean it.
00:29:40
Speaker
Drawing again after a really big break is extraordinarily difficult. I walked into your drawing class But after 30 years, you feel so exposed and like a fraud. It's really difficult.
00:29:54
Speaker
We should explain a little bit about how that came about. Yeah, I speak to a lot of people who feel like this, women especially. They have the dream and then they give it up because they somehow feel that they are not enough.
00:30:07
Speaker
Quite often I see people coming back after the kids have left home and they're suddenly like they'll rock up in a drawing class and just be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, i always wanted to do this, but somehow I felt that I couldn't. And that sense of giving people permission to put that aside is really core to what I'm doing. Like that sense of, you know, just turn up and try. You know, there there is no such thing as a bad drawing. The bad drawing is the one that you don't make.
00:30:31
Speaker
Let's loop back to how did you get into teaching art Yeah, we should we should loop back, shouldn't we? By accident, as with most things in my life. I have this philosophy, I'm not particularly ambitious, but if something sounds like it'll make a good story afterwards, just say yes and see what happens. I decided to take this year out and I'd always been the person producing or supporting the creative people to do their thing, to make something happen. i was like, maybe I should try doing some creative stuff for myself. And part of it was, okay, well, why don't I just go back to a drawing class and reconnect with that?
00:31:07
Speaker
So I rocked up a Kent adult education in Canterbury. This brilliant woman called Judith Ancatel, who was running the life classes there. I'd just dropped in and and started drawing again. Drawing is extraordinary. It uses your brain in really unusual ways because it's not just thinkky It's very embodied. You're using your hands. You are using your eyes. You are relating everything that you know. You are relating what you're seeing. You are stopping your brain taking shortcuts. It is just extraordinary. it It gives you this flow that you don't get from many things in life. And I did a couple of years of going on to Judith's class and then COVID hit. And Judith is in her early 70s now.
00:31:49
Speaker
And we kind of become friends. And she pinged me one day and was like, well, look, I don't think I'm going to be able to continue the classes when they begin again. You know, I think i'm I'm done. Would you be interested in taking over the class? It never occurred to me to think about kind of doing this sort of thing.
00:32:06
Speaker
OK, yeah. All right. I'll give it a go. And yeah, so I became an art teacher. but I took over. a Brilliant. That's how it should always happen. Yeah.
00:32:19
Speaker
In theory, I've got an an m MA, so i'm I'm qualified to teach something, possibly not drawing. But actually a lot of the work that I've done with producing, project managing, the skills are really transferable, right? How do you teach somebody to do something? You break it down into its component parts and introduce them to them in an order.
00:32:37
Speaker
Plus, I think a lot of it is about you're reading the audience as well.
Teaching Philosophy and Building Community
00:32:42
Speaker
And the audience is different in front of you, I'd imagine every week. And you're having to rework what you're doing to bring that particular group of people together, which is pretty much like working with clients.
00:32:53
Speaker
yeah I'm not sure how much I do that. I suspect that I am not necessarily the most good at reading people, shall we say. I enjoy figuring things out with somebody or I enjoy like asking questions that help somebody figure something out for themselves.
00:33:10
Speaker
And then what happened with Kent Adult Education? When did I start teaching? About 21. So it was after the second lockdown and they were really good. They let me do um postgraduate teaching, what's called a CET. So I was learning the you know the real pedagogy as well, even though i was bringing my own stuff in.
00:33:32
Speaker
But um a few years back, the the central government made a decision that they were changing funding for further education. One of the things that they did was that the government central government would no longer fund classes for leisure and pleasure. So that means that all of these you know evening classes or you know classes that you know people hitting retirement were taking, none of this was centrally funded. The only things that were allowed ought to be funded were health related or stuff that would help people be more employable, skills for work. I just cannot get my head around this at all. My husband's been teaching in secondary schools for 25 years. And the rates of mental health are going up as creative subjects are being eradicated out of the system. And then you're looking at the mental health of the population in decline and leisure and pleasure is not important for people's well-being.
00:34:30
Speaker
i kind of think there's a correlation here of why so many kids are not in school. Yeah. Yeah, it's really like I think we have... This kind of instrumentalised view of education and in fact the arts, you know the idea that creativity has got to serve something else. They can't just have art for art's sake, it's got to be about bringing communities together or being healthy. yeah It does all of these things, but also it does it because it is a fundamentally human thing.
00:34:59
Speaker
don't think I appreciated until I started teaching ah in adult education just how much it is the first bit of safety net. The fact that it was centrally funded and there were really good reduction rates for people. Just how valuable that is to get people out in a group, talking to each other, doing something together. Like that's so vital for kind of cohesion, sanity. Met some really troubled, broken people in the last few years.
00:35:31
Speaker
You know, now that's not there. that It's one of the first places that you're going to be caught if you are falling through the cracks. Yeah. And that's gone. That's awful. So your solution was?
00:35:43
Speaker
but Yeah. So actually what happened is is because of the funding changes, most of the creative tutors at Kent took voluntary redundancy. And actually, i was kind of, I should be doing my own thing. So now I run once a week a two-hour life drawing class in a local village hall.
00:36:02
Speaker
I get about between 15 and 20 people along each Friday. We draw together. We have a nice cup of tea and some biscuits. I work with a real variety of models. It's lovely and slowly we are growing a community. You know, people are starting to do their own projects together.
00:36:18
Speaker
It is sort of giving them permission, or at least it's just telling them that they don't need anyone's permission, that they can just do stuff. Go on, try it. Yeah, great. I found it really interesting to come along because I haven't been life drawing for 30 years since I was at art college.
00:36:36
Speaker
I've done other stuff, textile work or or screen printing, but I've had a whole 10 years of creative block. And it was the profanity embroidery group that got me out of that.
00:36:47
Speaker
I found it really hard to sit with a blank page. So coming to your drawing class was a big deal. And it's why I couldn't work on a big piece of paper. I had to work in a, in a sketchbook.
00:36:59
Speaker
I was worried that I wouldn't even be able to concentrate. long enough. Although you said drawing is freeing, you go in a flow. for someone like me, i felt it's almost like what an athlete would have to think.
00:37:13
Speaker
Am I having to overcome my negative internal voice the whole time? You're allowed to make a mark, it's allowed to be wrong. You can feel frustrated with it. It's all fine. And you're almost having this double think going on while you're trying to enjoy yourself. You can do both at the same time, I found, by the end of it. But it's such a weird process that I don't think you get with anything else. No, I think you're right. And um I still get it as well.
00:37:40
Speaker
I try and teach in a really honest way. I have days where I'm too embarrassed to draw in front of the class or stuff goes wrong. It is a constant battle.
00:37:51
Speaker
It was a little bit like I was talking about the thing with caring for my folks, where I was learning to put aside the irritation and the boredom and the kind of frustration and do that kind of little trick of turning it into your favour.
00:38:08
Speaker
a lovely kind of I think it's a Douglas Adams quote where he talks about what do you do if you've got a 20 stone judo expert running at you? where you use the weight of momentum against him.
00:38:19
Speaker
you know you you You turn in and you flip him and you use the thing that's going to fuck you up to move you forward. And I think it's kind of like that with drawing and art as well. You have to welcome those frustrations and negative thoughts of this is shit.
00:38:37
Speaker
You are shit. With text hour, I think it's hilarious. Every time I'm like, what I'm going to do is learn from the last time where I made it far too complicated. I'm going to make it really simple for myself by doing something completely different, which then turns out to be even worse, more learnings, more fuck ups, more frustration. and then you're like, well, I'm never going to do collage. I'm never going to do a plique again. Gold threads are And you learn all these things.
00:39:06
Speaker
Slowly you have like a ah toolkit of fucking things you never touch ever again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. um And then suddenly you realise that that stuff that you thought was impossible months ago that you're doing almost without thinking about it.
00:39:22
Speaker
and so I'm just going to get on a soapbox a little bit. This is the thing government doesn't understand about the creative industries, is it teaches you problem solving in a completely different way to algebra.
00:39:33
Speaker
Because every time you rock up to that piece of paper, that textile project, whatever it is, you're faced with things that have a life and a mind of its own. You are different every day in how you approach everything. And you just have to problem solve yourself and the outcome. constantly. Yeah, it's really true. you know, we had years and years of women in STEM, you know, let's get girls coding. And one of the things that got momentum, you know, everyone should learn to code, everyone should learn IT, t everyone should kind of be in digital, your next job is going to be in cyber. And we lost this sense that there is alongside that kind of deterministic, logical way of thinking, which was how I was raised. um You know, I was raised by scientists, I was raised in an academic hothouse environment, that there is also this intuitive, felt, creative
00:40:29
Speaker
illogical, uncanny, weird discipline of creativity that is about that. So what? What now? What can I try? This is going wrong. That teaches you this agility and flexibility of thought and this openness to change and this openness to chance and error. Yeah, that gentle letting go of of the crisis.
00:40:53
Speaker
helps you find other ways of circumventing and living with and working with and these are such valuable skills for the future yeah i agree aside from but your life drawing classes you're also teaching hastings and i think other environments where you make your own charcoal and draw with that Is that right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So again, this is stuff that sort of, you know, come out of that initial class. I, few times a year, I teach a class down at Hastings Grand Prix Gallery. And they asked me along because a life model that I work with just recommended me. And I was there last week teaching a still life class where we basically um made ridiculous Blue Peter make boxes and then drew them. It was such a lovely, lovely afternoon. But I also, somebody who rocked up in my classes, this guy called Mark, he owns an area of woodland not far from Canterbury and he is kind of rewilding it, caring for it. He's a a woodsman, he's a a greenwood carver, he makes spoons.
00:41:58
Speaker
And he was like, well, why don't we do a thing together we' come out here? And so we we do occasional days where you rock up, you meet Mark, you meet me in this woodland. We teach you how to burn charcoal.
00:42:10
Speaker
So you spend the morning making charcoal, the afternoon drawing with the charcoal that you've just made in this amazing woodland. Next thing is probably organising some portrait classes. But I also still do bits and bobs of digital things. I'm working on a project at the moment with ah a ah disability arts organisation called Unlimited, who are amazing, but we are producing some online courses about ending exploitation in the creative sector. So helping artists advocate for fair pay and helping organisations understand how asking for free work disproportionately affects disabled people. So like really fascinating places to be thinking alongside this. Okay. So how do you fundamentally help people be creative themselves?
00:42:57
Speaker
And what about your own work, your own personal artwork? What's happening there? It's horrifically on the back boiler at the moment. The faces that you see, for me, they are like scales. I have somebody who I'm proud to call a friend now, a woman called Chloe, who runs a project called Drawing is Free.
00:43:17
Speaker
And every Monday, eight until nine in the morning, about 400 people turn up on Zoom and we draw each other for an hour. It's a brilliant thing. Portrait trade stuff is almost accidental. I do it because it is...
00:43:31
Speaker
a thing to draw. Like you have no, you just draw the thing that's in front of you. But my own work is much more complicated. i'm I'm dealing with ideas. I still have a practice in drawing. I have this loose set of, I guess it's like a research project around, sounds ridiculous, kind of Cold War history in the history of the internet, but also looking at the way that is now affecting how society is now so it's kind of looking for these little links between the Manhattan Project and Facebook for instance and it's just I kind of tootle away with it occasionally but the last year or so I've had very little actual time in the studio so I feel a bit of a fraud talking about my own practice.
Reflecting on the Caregiving Experience and Advice
00:44:18
Speaker
Do you want to talk a little bit about the Hy-Fi Collective? Yeah, I think kind of part of this big change that I went through, you know, stepping away from my digital career, I applied for a kind of artist development programme called Drawing Correspondence, run by Chloe Briggs, Drawing is Free, Anita Taylor, who is the Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone. and Tanya Kovacs, who is ah an artist with a practice rooted in drawing. And it was a six-week online development programme that ran through lockdown. And it was about bringing sort of 10 people together to think about their drawing practice and bring them forward and give them a come built-in network.
00:45:04
Speaker
And Hy-Fee Collective grew out of that. It was the 10 of us who were on this course, and we organised a show down in Folkestone. Out of the back of this development course, we formed a collective hyphae as a way of showing our work together. And it is about these hidden connections and roots and the fact that by sharing conversations and our practices and staying connected and in relation with each other, that we have this good of network that supports our own practice.
00:45:37
Speaker
I mean, taking that in mind, everything we do together makes us stronger and your journey since 2015, if you could go back to that first moment when you realised things were subtly going wrong, what would you tell yourself about the journey ahead?
00:45:57
Speaker
I don't think I have a good answer for this. That's fine. Other than, yeah, let it come. Face it and... Allow it to happen.
00:46:09
Speaker
Trying to fight against it doesn't help. I think accepting what is going on around you and trying to turn the energy and turn with it and swim with it, I think, is the only way that you can approach those things.
00:46:28
Speaker
Many, many years ago, I swam in the Colorado River in America, and it has a very strong current. And I realised that I was being swept downstream and started to panic a bit and started to kind of try and swim back to to the group.
00:46:45
Speaker
Of course, immediately against the current. And then eventually somebody spotted what was going on and went, stop, stop, swim to the side. So this idea that like you use that force to help you, that don't try, swim upstream, swim to the side, get out, walk up. Be aware of that these environments could sweep you away, but there are ways of using that energy to save yourself, I guess. And actually, you know, your life...
00:47:14
Speaker
Well, to bring the outside, it seems almost like it is what it should be. yeah Maybe, you know, I think stuff is still changing and and developing.
00:47:25
Speaker
And hopefully, you know, we'll continue for a while. That's brilliant. Thank you very much for joining me. You're welcome.
00:47:48
Speaker
you