Gravity//David Clegg

David Clegg is an artist who visits care homes collecting life stories from dementia patients. His project, The Trebus Project, was named after Polish war veteran, Edmund Trebus, who fills his house with artefacts that have been deemed 'rubbish'. In a way Clegg does the same thing, making his work out of the stories of dementia patients that have been forgotten about and misunderstood because of their condition. The project started when Clegg decided after his degree and a life of wanting to be an artist, that he no longer wanted to be one ("I don't like artists"), so decided to work in a care home. He gradually started working with dementia patients and building up life stories from their confused and jumbled memories; some of which turned out to be quite amazing.

The Gravity lecture David Clegg gave us turned out to be my favourite of the lectures we have had so far, as Clegg was a brilliant speaker, who spoke to his audience with great confidence rather than from a script as many of the other visiting artists have. He had some beautiful stories and ideas that he shared very well. With the theme of Gravity this year being 'Time', Clegg's subject matter fitted in brilliantly, with his work being based of time, memories and loss.

David Clegg made the point many times throughout the lecture that he is not an art therapist. He is however an artist that uses patients' stories to make art rather than using therapy to help his patients. Clegg has worked with so many patients and has gained so many skills and so much knowledge concerned with dementia, that he now teaches nurses and care workers how to communicate with and listen to people with dementia. He has worked with a huge variety of patients, some with extraordinary stories, and some who have lived average lives as housewives or handymen. Clegg has also happened to record the last words of elderly patients and has been with them right up until their death. A great interest of his is language and how language changes with the condition, and how this affects their ability to make sense of memories and put the fragmented parts of memory together.

A discussion in one of my groups that was raised by this subject was the question of whether Clegg publishing life stories of ill elderly people is ethically correct, considering the condition of the patients he was working with. Some students believed that because the patients may not have been aware of what they would have been consenting to at the time. So is it right that he published their stories if they are unable to consent? This also leads to the question of the boundaries in art. A lot of artists make art to shock and go to extreme lengths to capture a shocking subject that may push and question boundaries, something I don't think David Clegg does.

I think Clegg's work is beautiful and genius in it's own way; it raises intellectual questions and reveals extraordinary stories. He doesn't push ridiculous questions and lets the work be understood by the less creative public; something I believe to be very important.