Independent Cinema for Everyone

This collaboration with The Imperfect Orchestra was inspired by the legacy of a collection of documents and artefacts from the artist’s grandmother Dilys Richardson (nee Tully), born in 1922. The daughter of a cinema pianist and a tax clerk, she lost her mother at the age of 4 and was subsequently passed from family member to family member until her father remarried in 1932. Dilys worked in London during the Second World War and married Frederic Richardson in 1945, when he returned from service in the RAF. They had one son, Andrew, in 1950.

Katy was Dilys’ first grandchild, and in the early part of 1978, a few months after Katy’s birth, Dilys began keeping a journal and scrapbook of memories, both of her experience of becoming a grandparent and her recollections of her earlier life. She continued to write this, seemingly without telling anyone she was doing so, until the end of the 1980s, around which point she began to develop dementia. Approximately 10 years later she began sending Katy anonymous parcels, including her wedding dress. Then, around 2005, she sent the journal.