Fractured Memories grew out of three month artist residency at the Sitterwerk Foundation in St Gallen, Switzerland sponsored by Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council. The work explores the physiological and psychological impact of living with loved ones with dementia. A comparison of Alzheimer’s care in Switzerland, with its aging demographic with India as the youngest population in the world. The ethical debate of death with dignity, where Switzerland has taken the lead, compared with Hindu concepts of dharma, which requires Hindus to take care of the aged and Prayopavesa, fasting to death.
Motivation
As a practicing sculptor I work primarily in brass but welcomed the opportunity to explore working in an entirely new medium for me of recycled glass. I wanted to produce a series of sculptures and wall art to explore the themes of memory loss and decay. It is a deeply personal work, exploring my father's condition of Alzheimer's and my own troubling lapses in memory relating to trauma. It traverses memories far past, recent past, fond, unpleasant, fading and altered. I aimed to collect and collate personal stories and testimonies of those both suffering and caring for loved ones with memory loss. In my father’s case, music was a key recall, as one of my hobbies is jazz singing, I wanted to incorporated that into my art practice. Musical memory can survive long after other forms of memory and cognitive function have disappeared. A favourite tune, in my father’s case “Smile”, helped me dispel the dark memories of his decline into insanity. I gathered old discarded and broken mirrors, possibly with personal testimonies attached, and altered their chemical nature, sometimes making clear glass into a mirror, tearing down layers for clarity, adding paint, engraving and doodling on fragments, or drilling through them to add depth as indicative of MRI brain scans to detect neurodegeneration. I would also have also liked to use float glass from construction sites as an environmental statement given the current levels of pollution in Delhi to explore the impact of air pollution on cognitive impairment and dementia. Compared to Switzerland’s vaunted air purity, where historically patients went to sanatoriums to recover from respiratory diseases such as TB, which is still rampant in India. I developed engraving, staining and glass cutting techniques along with soldering eroded aged mirrors and etching to scrawl memories and anecdotes of love and loss.
Variable size Mirror, paper, ink, copper
Fragments of mirrors and glass are often found on street corners in India. I was reflecting on the idea of self-concept and how, as humans, we recognize ourselves physically through our reflection. With dementia, this changes—we lose the ability to recognize words, loved ones, and eventually even ourselves. Mirrors and glass therefore became apt materials for this body of work.
In this initial series, I use multiple processes on corroded mirrors. Sometimes I add, sometimes subtract, through abstract mark-making and etching, revealing what resembles the inner stuffing of a mattress. At times, I play with opacity through deep engraving or painting; at others, I decoupage doodled paper to signify a patchwork of memories, concealing possible trauma.
In some places, I drill through the entire surface; in others, only a few millimetres, to suggest the erosion of memory. Like mould spreading, the surface becomes porous, unable to hold the burden of recollection.

Both Sides Now
Mirror, wood, faux pearl earring, glass, faux pearl necklace
This work invites viewers to sit on either side of a centrally placed mirror housed in an old-fashioned rotating wooden frame. A single faux pearl earring rests on one side, a necklace on the other. One expects to see their own reflection, but instead light passes through a hand-etched face of an aged woman.
On the reverse, part of the silver/aluminium backing is exposed, allowing viewers to gaze at the world through the eyes of someone with dementia. You can—but cannot—recognize the person sitting across.

Oval Mirror
Silver, antique, art glass, industrial enamel

Inspired partly by Günther Uecker’s Verlorene Erinnerung (Lost Memory), 1982, exhibited at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen in September 2025. Uecker’s work—a wooden box with iron nails pressed against a mirror—was created by forcibly shutting the box, the nails cracking the mirror opposite.

My work adopts this fractured design, using silver, antique textures, and kiln-fired industrial enamel in flesh tones on clear textured glass. These are soldered together using Tiffany-style stained glass technique. The imperfect oval reflects fragmented selves: clear glass suggests missing pieces, whilst blurred enamel strokes evoke ghostly traces of humanity.

Melting Faces
Float glass
Inspired by Dalí’s Persistence of Memory, these works imagine humans as candles melting away, losing substance and form. One depicts a man in profile, the other a woman front-facing. Using slumping and fusing techniques, float glass was cut with a jigsaw machine and carbide blade, layered, stacked, and kiln-fired.

Smile
Paint on radiator

This site-specific work honours my father, who had Alzheimer’s disease. He always said, “No matter what, always smile.” His words resonated with Charlie Chaplin’s song Smile from Modern Times, which spoke of resilience after the war.
The radiator’s long horizontal lines resembled sheet music bars, so I painted the lyrics across them. It felt like a warm embrace from my father above:
“When there are clouds in the sky, you’ll get by, If you smile through your fear and sorrow, Smile and maybe tomorrow, You’ll see the sun come shining through for you.”

Rock Face Erosion
Silver, antique mirror
This work resembles an old rectangular mirror frame, its wooden backing lost, edges broken, shattered pieces still clinging. The human body and memory, like a rock face, slowly erode away—still alive, but fragile, clinging desperately at the periphery.

Interviews
I have conducted interviews with people who lost loved ones to dementia. While patients endure internal turmoil as they realize they are forgetting, the impact on loved ones is profound.
As Anamika Chatterjee, whose mother has dementia, said: “We continue to exist because somebody remembers us. When we cease to exist in their minds, we stop existing emotionally, because their sense of existence is also being erased.”
These powerful audio testimonies have informed several works:

Failing Crossword
Silver, antique mirror, clear textured & black glass

Inspired by Stella Carlsen, whose German grandmothers both succumbed to dementia. One, determined to resist, solved crosswords daily, saying, “I will train my brain not to get any disease.” Yet she too was lost to dementia.
The work draws from Swiss architecture, echoing wooden shingled facades of old houses. The scalloped motif recalls Mughal qanat water systems, here resembling a leaking tap—opaque mirror flowing into clear glass. The crossword-like boxed structure collapses, like unsafe Swiss houses that once used to shelter families.

Melting Script
Antique mirror
As dementia progresses patients lose the ability to articulate, language once spoken fluently becomes fragmented. Words dissolve into incoherent sounds. This work, soldered with Tiffany stained glass technique, embodies that erosion of speech.

30’
Pencil on paper

Inspired by Daniel Winkler, who in 1995 chose civil service over military service to pursue medicine. Trained in dementia care, he recalled visiting an old priest whose wife suffered from dementia. She forgot to give her husband food and medicine, living in a 30-minute memory loop. She repeatedly wrote down Daniel’s details. After her death, volunteers found countless notes with his name.
This work depicts hand-cut post-it notes with Daniel’s details—initially neat, later overlapping chaotically, mirroring her fragmented memory.

Cadavre Series
Industrial enamel on float glass

These works depict the diminished quality of life of dementia patients—mere shells of themselves,, with the core still present but much else lost. Inspired by Francis Bacon, they use blurred flesh tones and hints of red, evoking distorted human presence.

KitKat
Enamel on fused glass & stainless steel

Emerging from Rachel Dwyer’s story: visiting her mother in a care home, she found a KitKat bar in a cat bowl. When asked why, her mother replied, “KitKat, cat food.”
Tragic yet comic, this moment reflects the surreal humour caregivers sometimes cling to, a coping mechanism that helps them endure.