Exploring grief, loss and dementia through art and poetry – the Voiceless Isolation exhibition

It’s the Voiceless Isolation exhibition opening evening, and spread across poster boards in the heart of the IoPPN are chronological sketches of an elderly woman punctuated with poetry. From scenes of her in a kitchen we follow her to being bed-bound in a care home just two days before her death. Some of the attendees wander the timeline, others inspect the detail, tone and textures, while a few prefer to shelter by the buffet table, creating both physical and emotional distance from the portraits.

The woman in the sketches is Marion, Tony Kerins and Anne Murphy’s mother who died four years ago of dementia.

“You might think I’m heartless,” Tony, a professional illustrator, says half in jest as he nods his head to some of the final sketches of his mother, “but it wasn’t like that”. It’s an exhibition that explores Tony and Anne’s shared experience and parallel responses of grief and frustration with healthcare for the elderly.

Tony explains that despite it being difficult at times, he felt a sense of responsibility to capture these moments, and drawing became a way of recording them. To “remember it. See, this is what life’s like. Funny and tragic”. He acknowledges these records are coloured with his own perception and that “sometimes what [he feels] is apparent!”

To which his daughter laughs in the direction of one of the sketches highlighting the jargon and bureaucracy surrounding her grandmother’s care. However, for Tony, these sketches were more than just a record; they were a way of coping and “a way [of facing] the present. Stare it out”.

Anne, who humbly does not consider herself a poet (despite being published and standing at her own exhibition), admits that at the time she was too upset to look at the sketches. They were too real. Instead, she turned to language when her own mother was struggling with hers.

She shares that her “writing served also as an emotional response to the absence of my mum and dad’s conversation” and that it was “a way of working out and making sense of the unanticipated situation: what began as a bed in a nursing home for a weekend, had become a place of residence for the final six and a half years of my mother’s life”.

She also says, “thinking out loud had always been acceptable in our family” and over the evening I learn that she and Tony were raised by a mother who listened, and was non-judgemental, strong, no-nonsense and clever.

The exhibition, taking its title from Anne’s newest poetry book, was originally shown at Sandy Hill Arts in Corfe Castle, Dorset. Anne and Tony say they never thought it would be shown somewhere like the IoPPN.

Yet Dr Christoph Mueller, an Academic Old Age Psychiatrist and Reader in Ageing and Mental Health Data Science who helped facilitate the exhibition, eloquently sums up why it is so important that work like this is shown here at the IoPPN. “Voiceless Isolation captures the silences, the frustrations, and also the human moments that often get lost in clinical notes or policy discussions… and research”.

As people chat over the clinking of glasses and hubbub, one clinician admits a feeling of guilt, that these sketches feel familiar, a scene that they swing into before having to rush back out again to continue with their never-ending list of tasks. Another talks of a profound sense of grounding and that the pieces displayed serve as a reminder why they work in old age care.

Mueller offers the audience hope through the research project DETERMIND, of which King’s College London is a site. The study will explore some of the issues raised by the exhibition, such as determinants of quality of life, care and costs and consequences of inequalities in people with dementia and their carers.

It asks the question; what is it that enables one family to live well with dementia and another with ostensibly the same illness and challenges to have an awful experience? The project will study the whole journey, not just diagnosis, medication or crisis points.

This powerful and poignant exhibition may garner mixed reactions, but what it certainly does not do is leave people apathetic. It confronts us with questions about our own impending caring responsibilities or (if we let ourselves) the care we ourselves may receive in years to come and ultimately, the importance of being heard.

Voiceless Isolation is on display in the Education Hub 11 June 2025.

Find more about Tony’s work.

Learn more  about Anne’s book Voiceless Isolation.