Careful how you go!

A film made as part of a Sheffield project called The Look At Me Project: Images of women and ageing (http://www.representing-ageing.com)
see short film at
http://www.representing-ageing.com/esrcvideo.php

Metamorphic

Since it is the Other within us who is old, it is natural that the revelation of our age should come to us from outside — from others. We do not accept it willingly. Simone de Beauvoir

I only came across this quotation after seeing a review of a book called, Out of Time by Lynne Segal. In one Guardian review it says:
Lynne Segal's thoughtful analysis of ageing offers a far more combative, zestful approach. It asks: when suffering from "temporal vertigo", absorbing at once all the ages you have ever been, and dealing with the inevitable loss of loved ones, how do you accept the physical ravages and build on the experiences of the past, to live fully in the present? What does it mean to age well?

I saw this interesting abstract from a longer article and found it thought provoking:

Dance, ageing and the mirror: Negotiating watchability

1. Justine Coupland

Justine Coupland, Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University, Cardiff CF10 3EU, Wales, UK. 

Abstract

Bodily display and self-awareness are generally mediated by restrictive ideologies of youthful beauty. ‘How do I look?’ is therefore a salient question in terms of personal ageing. Dance makes bodies watchable, while ageing has been claimed to make bodies ‘unwatchable’. Ethnographic research conducted amongst a group of older dancers provides an opportunity to study these ideological tensions empirically, by analysing the discursive representations of older dancers and their teacher. ‘The mirror’ is a productive theme in the data, giving access to understandings of (un)watchability of more and less literal sorts. It proves to be the case that, while dance as a practice for older women remains fitfully tainted by culturally dominant ageist assumptions about the body and ageing, it also opens up far more emancipating ideologies. Older dancers’ articulation of these ideologies are suggestive of how embodied ageing can be reconstrued, well beyond dance contexts. 

http://dcm.sagepub.com/content/7/1/3.abstract

I hope this does not seem trite but I have always felt that Michaelangelo's Pieta was the most incredible and beautiful image of love, grief and loss. I have used the image to represent another form of loss that many of us quietly grieve about; the memory of ourselves as young with all our egoism and vibrancy

Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.– Margaret Atwood

       Towards Invisibility

Who are you?

Images towards a piece called rockface (painted plaster, cast from clay original)

The most striking aspect of the ageing body is its invisibility. The ageing body is hidden, not only from the challenging gaze of a gerontophobic world, but from its owner herself who, encountering it in a department store mirror, say, is unlikely to recognise it. "Who can that portly old hag be?" she asks herself, and is startled to find, perhaps for the dozenth time that day, that it is she.

                          Germaine Greer (Guardian article)

“I want to grow old without facelifts... I want to have the courage to be loyal to the face I've made. Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you'd never complete your life, would you? You'd never wholly know you.”  Marilyn Monroe

Clay sculpture (work in progress)
Although one half is the young me and the other the older me they do seem to hold together much like we do, old on the outside but all our past ages still persisting and existing on the inside.