Celine came to talk to us about her project ‘Tulip’. It’s an intensely personal and emotional body of work, documenting her journey through a painful and difficult part of her life - her mother’s diagnosis and eventual death from lung cancer and secondary tumours.
Her mother loved to have flowers in the house - of which the tulip was her favourite - and the book is punctuated with images of vases of flowers, fresh or wilting and dying. The images capture her mother’s time in hospital, and also at home. The detail, the small mundane things Celine noticed - like the bowl of washing up, cushions on the sofa, a plate of toast, pots of homemade jam - are interspersed with images of her mother lying in her bed, the effects of the chemotherapy on her hair. A stark realisation of her life as it had been, and had now become.
It’s a beautiful book, full of colour. Celine says of her work that she ‘felt a real need to record everything, like some kind of magpie, collecting thoughts and moments rather than shiny things’, although she struggled at times to understand just why she had decided to introduce a camera into what was an unbearable situation.
I am reminded of Miyako Ishiuchi’s work, Mother’s, which captures images of her mother’s most intimate items, such as underwear, lipsticks, a hairbrush still holding strands of her hair. A project which also looks to capture memories - the essence of a person - and to help with the process of grieving.
For Celine, her project did not conclude with her mother’s death. Her mother had been a head chef, and Celine found herself standing in her kitchen looking through her mother’s lifetime’s collection of recipes, and threw herself into cooking, then growing food. ‘A stranger in my mother’s kitchen’ became an outlet to help her cope with her grief, and a project which she is now planning to publish as a book.
