When people talk about dementia, it seems like the focus tends to be on what is lost. This is for good reason, certainly; loss of memory leads to a lot of confusion, uncertainty, and sometimes sorrow, as we’ve seen at Silver Club and Elderberry. That said, working with members in Silver Club over the past semester has really made me more interested in what pieces remain in a person living with Alzheimer’s.

For the most part, art has really been a great outlet for discovering where people’s interests lie if they don’t directly tell you. In fact, what I found was that situations in which members took to a project immediately always happened unexpectedly. A woman that I worked with a while ago is in fairly advanced stages of dementia, but when you give her a paint brush, she makes beautiful and precise images in such a way that can only have come from experience. If I asked her what she thought about what she was making, she wasn’t afraid to engage critically with the piece. “I don’t know,” she said, “it needs something. Maybe we should get some lunch and come back to it.”

Another woman that I worked with a number of times made evident several weeks ago that she just wasn’t really feeling up to making art. I got to a point where I stopped introducing projects to her, and just spent the time focusing on singing together; she has a database of memorized lyrics like I’ve never seen! Even though I gave up on the visual aspect a little while ago, a staff member lent us her ipad on one of the last Silver Club days and invited us to play with an app that lets you doodle on the screen. To my surprise, my partner took to it very well, despite frustration with the technology, and had a very deliberate and intentional way of creating line. It was exciting to see her readdress the interest in art that I knew she had- if only for a brief time! It’s amazing to me that both of these women can tap into a deep-seated interest and talent in art that, at this point, they may not even know they had.

~Sarah Hall, Art & Design student