François Matarasso

Art and Agency in Old Age

‘Winter Fires’ was the second of the Regular Marvels books to be published, in the autumn of 2012. Seeing the steady rise over the years in participatory art work with older people, I worried that only one side of the experience of ageing was being recognised—that of diminishment, loss and need. I knew that older people are artists too and have as much to offer as anyone. So, with support from the Baring Foundation, I set out to tell that story, meeting older artists across the UK and Northern Ireland.

They fell into three broad groups: professionals who were still creating after the age of retirement; people whose youthful love of art had been blocked by the need to work; and people who had come to art for the first time in retirement, often using age as their subject Their lives were rich in experience, artistic creativity and commitment. Above all, artisting, to use the word I invented in the book, gave them agency at a time when physical, economic, social and emotional losses can seem only to diminish our freedoms and our selves.

‘Art does have a further capacity that is quite particular to itself. It allows the artist, professional or amateur, committed or impulsive, to act in the world. By creating something that did not exist she makes an event that changes reality, however slightly, and gains agency in her own existence. She expresses something of the unique nature of that existence and in doing so becomes a subject, not only an object.’

‘Winter Fires, Art and Agency in Old Age’, Baring Foundation 2012

The book included portraits of the people I met, made on an iPad by my old friend Mik Godley. Mik has spent much of the past 25 years investigating his family connections with Silesia and the wartime events that ended with the region being transferred from Germany to Poland. Much of his painting has involved working from found images on the Internet, so it was natural to ask him to work from photographs I took of the people I met. The results tell the same story as the text, but in another language.

When I met the people whose lives are documented in Winter Fires, I was aware of getting older, but I was still young enough to see them as different to myself. I think that shows in the text, despite my efforts of empathy and imagination. Now, I’ve reached the stage of life many of them were at, and it’s the young who seem different.

I believe that the argument of Winter Fires is true: the practice of art gives us agency, even when so many of the powers we once had have weakened or gone. My mother wrote poetry in the days before her death at the age of 94.

We cannot know what is coming but as long as I can use words to make sense of it, I will be me.

You can download Winter Fires as a PDF here. Free print copies are available from the Baring Foundation.