At the end of my garden is an old barn where I have been hoarding “stuff” since my mother’s death in 2005. As I stared working on this project, I realised that really the objects in my barn represented my grief. My mother’s old lamp shade, her dinner plate, the lid to one of her saucepans. These items were part of a vivid memory of the two of us eating roast chicken on a Sunday.
 

Many of these things are covered with years of dust and cobwebs yet in some way I believed that my mother lived on in these everyday objects and the barn had become a tomb I had created to hide away from loneliness and heart break.
 

As I worked, I realised that these objects were meaningless. They were just things bought from shops. In our society where consumerism is almost our new religion, I had mistakenly attached emotions to objects with no value. My mother was not inside the dark barn, she was not the genie in the lamp. In fact, she was outside in the living landscapes of beautiful Suffolk.