This Is Life – My Senior Thesis

At art school, we do things a little differently. I never had to take math or science, we’re encouraged to have our voice in essays, performance art is accepted as a presentation/report, and to graduate we work on a senior thesis project. I did my senior thesis on Mabel Sawhill- a 97 year old inspirational woman who lives to help other people.

I decided to do my thesis on seniors who were defying the stereotypes of aging. Most of the stories I had seen on seniors were sad and depressing, usually of someone losing their home or their memory- or both. I was determined to do something positive showing that retiring and growing old doesn’t mean you have to go into a nursing home or stop being active. The original idea was to do profiles on multiple people. I found a 76 year old hockey player (on the GeriHatTricks) and an 80 year old farmer among others. But none of them could compare to Mabel who at 97, was old enough to be their mother. So in late December I began to focus solely on her.

I shot with Mabel a little over two months following her to different catering jobs, church functions, Costco (her second home), and even into her home where she showed off her impressive shoe collection. I had a nice video about her philosophies on life, how she functions her catering business, and the relationships she shares with her wonderful niece and her family. She began catering as a second career (after teaching and working for the Navy) to send her great-nieces through private school and college. Then in late February she tells me shes flying to Iowa to throw her sister a 100th birthday party. How could I not go? The deadline for having thesis done was March 28 and on March 14th I flew home from Iowa with hours and hours of footage. Needless to say it was kind of a crunch to get it all sorted. I had a 5 minute story on Mabel here in DC and when combined with footage from Iowa, it just wasn’t as interesting. So at the last minute I edited all of DC down to about 1 minute to kind of establish who Mabel is and the rest of the final video was Iowa. So much for shooting for a whole year. I’m debating going back and putting more in- what do you think?

One of the benefits to going to the Corcoran is all senior thesis work is shown in the Corcoran Gallery of Art. I was fortunate enough to have a black-room where the video was projected and audio played through speakers. It is on view from April 23 – May 22. On the 23rd we had a large opening for the students and guests so Mabel and her family attended. She hadn’t seen it before and it was great to see her reactions for the first time. She liked it!

Photos by the wonderfully talented and supportive Jay Westcott.

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