My grandmother battles the disease of dementia and everytime I visit her I am struck by the stillness that surrounds her. In that silence, memory behaves strangely. It flickers, retracts, resurfaces, and slips away again, as if caught between presence and absence. I began this project not to document her decline, but to understand the fragile fabric of memory itself.

A birdhouse shelters a handmade book. At first, it appears comforting, familiar, domestic, almost tender. But as it opens up, the birdhouse becomes a vessel that holds memory in uneven fragments, asking viewers to experience the instability my grandmother lives inside every day. What was once a symbol of refuge becomes a structure that confines. 

Birds have always been part of her story. She believed her mother returned to her as a bird after her passing, a quiet guardian watching from the trees. She carried this belief through her life, caring for stray animals with the same devotion she gave to her family. The birdhouses she tended with pride once lined the edges of her home, and later followed her to the dementia care center. These are small reminders of a world she was trying not to forget.

Inside the roof of the sculpture, a raven folded from an archival photograph of my great-grandmother sits in shadow. It represents the fear threaded through generations and the looming presence of inherited illness. As the book is handled, its images shift and distort, mirroring the way my grandmother recalls her life: in flashes, in fragments, in moments that dissolve before they can settle. In the act of making, I search for a way to keep her with me, even as she slips into the soft fading of her own mind.