The Journey

On May 3 I left college after printmaking all day and travelled to Yorkshire to visit all the sites connected with Grandma Brown, Mary Jane Brown.
I had to first decide why I was doing this. After all I could gain a lot of family history from the internet and through letters and the telephone, but I felt a really strong desire to go and look, just be there. I wanted to tread the same ground and look at the same places and see if I could get closer to the person in that way.

I began with the most important place to me, that is the Mental Hospital where she spent the last 15 years of her life and where I was forbidden to go until I was 16. I was 14 when she died.

I then visited the houses and farms where she lived, the church where she played the organ, and was married. I went to the graveyard where her ashes were scattered, and established the site of one of the three photographs I have of her.