Tulip, my mother's favourite flower
In September 2009 my mother was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. By the following spring we knew that her illness was terminal.
I began photographing during the final year of her life, but I knew I did not want Tulip to become a graphic record of dying. My mother was a vivid, distinctive person, and I wanted the photographs to hold onto the things that made her uniquely herself: her home, her cats, her love of colour and particularly her flowers.
Flowers had always filled the house. As I photographed them they began to take on another significance, holding ideas of beauty, love and generosity alongside isolation, deterioration and death.
The project became as much about our family home and the traces of a shared life as it was about illness. Tulip is ultimately a portrait of my mother, but also of the domestic world she created and the experience of knowing that it was disappearing.
Publication
Tulip
Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2016
Selected Press:
The Observer - Photobook of the Month: Tulip book review – a daughter’s floral tribute
The Guardian - How I photographed my mother’s last days, written by Homa Khaleeli
BBC News - My mother's favourite flower: A life remembered
Photo-Eye - Book of the Week: A pick by Jordan Sullivan
British Journal of Photography - Tulip: Quiet Images of a Mother’s Struggle with Cancer
Photomonitor - Book review by Anna McNay
Creative Review - Photography Annual Personal Work category winner
The Guardian - In Pictures Tea, tulips and tenderness: my mother’s final days
The Independent - Celine Marchbank, Tulip: My Mother’s Favourite Flower book review
ilPost Italy - A flower not to forget
L'Oeil de la Photographic - Tulip, My Mother’s favourite flower
PhotoVoice - How Photography Helped me: Celine Marchbank
Vanity Fair Italy - I photographed my mother's last days of life
The Times Literary Supplement - Book review