Artist statement, 2018In this painting, my grandmother, Mollie, is seated in the right foreground. She is recovering from the stroke that she suffered in 1993. Her body is surrounded by an aura. In the left foreground is my grandmother as an eighteen-year-old when she was baptised a Roman Catholic. This vignette is taken from a photograph of Mollie in the artist’s collection in which she appears as a smiling young girl with a statue of the virgin. The words are of a well-known children’s hymn, 'Jesus loves me', are inscribed at the centre because that is what she was taught to sing at the convent. Mollie worked in the orphanage laundry from the age of twelve till she was twenty-one years old.