In September 2009 Celine Marchbank’s mother, Sue Miles, was diagnosed with lung cancer and a brain tumour. “While I was trying to come to terms with the fact she was dying, I decided I wanted, or maybe needed, to document the time she had left. I didn’t want to create a graphic portrayal of her death, it would have been impossible and wrong to focus only on the dying part, but rather I wanted to photograph our last months together. I looked at the things that made her uniquely her, the details in her house I thought I knew so well, the things that would also be gone when she was. Her love of flowers was a beautiful part of her personality; the house was always full of them, and as I photographed them I realised they were symbolic of what was happening – they represented happiness, love, kindness and generosity, but also isolation, decay, and finally death.”