Eighty-Five Years (2024) chronicles my mother's life through a small selection of archival images and sound I inherited as part of an extensive collection of legal documents, letters, several family albums and an analogue music recording from her family home for fifty-five years. It also features footage captured from a mobile phone during her final months of life.

 

Presented as a brief visual and auditory montage, the piece sketches her journey of migrating from Trinidad to Britain. It meditates on her hopes and aspirations as a twenty-four-year-old woman—moving from one continent to another—reflecting on her devotion to my father, the racist working environments she endured, and her role as the family matriarch. The piece concludes with her arduous experience of coping with Alzheimer's disease before dissolving into the full affair of her Caribbean-style funeral in west London.