SOUND IDEA
Jane Baker, diversional therapist and artist questions the care people with dementia receive in aged-care homes
Psychological neglect of dementia sufferers living in agedcare facilities is rife, says artist Jane Baker, who is exploring the issue in a soundscape exhibition. Troubled by what she witnessed as a diversional therapist with dementia sufferers, Baker has responded with The Inward Eye – A Psychoacoustic Journey, on display at Mona.
The message the artist most wants to convey through three poignant works is simple. “I want to see much more normality [in care facilities] for people with dementia,” she says. “Without it, it’s hell for them. They need things that are familiar, they need things that are part of their routine and they need to be taken notice of.”
As well as working with sufferers for a year, Baker spent almost a decade researching aspects of dementia. This launch, which is part of her ongoing Art of Ageing project at Mona, comes just months after the artist lost her father to Parkinson’s disease with Lewy body dementia.
In Outspeaking, two huge padlocked doors stand in a solemnly lit room. Behind each of the 36 door panels is a recording. Visitors choose a listening implement – a glass, a stethoscope or an obstetric Pinard horn – to hear family members and friends talking about failings in their loved ones’ residential care. The disturbing testimonies include a niece describing the self-inflicted injuries an aunt suffered after falling out of bed, becoming disorientated and stuck behind a door, and trying to dig her way out through the wall for several hours until she was eventually found by staff.
The Exchange is embedded in an old piano and works like a rudimentary telephone exchange. It investigates the auditory world of dementia by inviting visitors to put on headphones and immerse themselves in a soundscape. Most are the mundane sounds of an aged-care facility: an elderly woman calling for help, loud chitchat and clatter of plates at mealtimes.
Eight sounds were recorded outside the facility, including on a farm and in a street with buskers.
Through the contrast, Baker highlights the aurally restricted environment of many aged-care facilities.
In Head Zones, visitors lie back in a dentist’s chair in a room resembling a Tasmanian fern forest and listen to calming natural sounds. Baker trialled this soundscape for three weeks in a psycho-geriatric facility with speakers disguised in a chair. If the resident sat in the chair, the gentle emanations would begin. She says it had a soothing effect on many. And that, she believes, is what dementia sufferers are so often missing.
“They are so easily pleased and so easily soothed if the people are there to do it,” says Baker.
Baker advocates the mandatory availability of a psychologist who does not answer to the management in every aged-care facility, along with tighter staff-to-patient ratios. “Help [often] isn’t available, mostly because most places are understaffed and most don’t focus on psychological needs,” she says.