Abstract
The capacity to feel and express themselves in response to worldly surroundings is a defining feature of who a person living with dementia is, and can have profound effects on the ways in which they think, act and express creativity. Drawing on a year of intensive collaborative work with residents living with dementia in an Orthodox Jewish care home in London, I extend our perceptions and understandings of how a couple experiences their day-to-day lives, with particular attention paid to their affective practice in creativity. I demonstrate how the affective creativity of the couple emerges, circulates, and transforms as a spouse’s dementia develops, whilst feeling bodies continuously (re)make relations and familiarize themselves with the immediate surroundings through the making of artworks.
Highlights
Rachel (87), living with moderate dementia, draws many geometrical and abstract figures, examining them in detail, inch by inch, over the rim of her glasses in the arts and crafts center at an Orthodox Jewish care home (Home) in London
Drawing on arts practice-based collaborative ethnographic research in the Home, I reveal how the feeling bodies and affective practices of couples have an impact on the experience of creativity, and at the same time, the ways in which the processes and the outcomes of artworks transform the affective dimensions of couplehood
Unlike previous methods which are mainly researcher-led and pre-designed, this project focuses on day-to-day experience as a research method, conducting a collaborative work with residents and their significant others
Summary
Rachel (87), living with moderate dementia, draws many geometrical and abstract figures, examining them in detail, inch by inch, over the rim of her glasses in the arts and crafts center at an Orthodox Jewish care home (Home) in London. Drawing on arts practice-based collaborative ethnographic research in the Home, I reveal how the feeling bodies and affective practices of couples have an impact on the experience of creativity, and at the same time, the ways in which the processes and the outcomes of artworks transform the affective dimensions of couplehood. It is worth mentioning that this study is not representative, nor does it offer a theoretical alternative or specific clinical benefits; instead it calls for us to advance our understandings and discussions in relation to affective creativity in dementia beyond the currently predominant individual cognitive- and outcome- centered approaches This ethnography of affective creativity focuses less on the quality of creativity, but more on the process, the situation and the ways in which the couple engages with the artworks. They moved into the Home in late 2013 at the cost of selling their house, in which their whole married life and memories are embedded and where their three children grew up, and
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