In September 2023, Olivia Thompson moved to Chichester to begin a Fine Art undergraduate degree at the University of Chichester. She was 18, new to the city, and by her own admission feeling out of her depth. A few weeks later, she found Guardian Angel Carers. She wasn’t looking for a vocation. She needed a job. But care has a way of asking more of people than they expect to give, and over the two and a half years that followed, it asked something of Olivia that quietly changed the direction of her art.
Finding her feet
Olivia joined our Chichester branch as a CareAngel in November 2023, and like many people who come to care work without a background in it, she found the early months both harder and more rewarding than she had anticipated. The work settled into her gradually. She got to know her clients, built familiarity with the colleagues she worked alongside, and began to understand the particular texture of visiting someone in their own home, where the evidence of a whole life surrounds you and the relationship you are building is only ever one small part of a much longer story.
What she didn’t know then was that the job was also finding its way into her paintings.
The moment it clicked
During her second year of university, Olivia had started painting family photographs. It began from a personal place, a response to missing home and reflecting on previous chapters of her life. But the work kept pulling in a different direction, and it wasn’t until a university critique that she understood why. A lecturer asked her to describe the feeling she wanted to evoke. As she spoke, she realised she was describing her clients’ houses.
In her own words: “I would go into their homes and see old photographs of their lives on the walls, familiar in a way that felt ambiguous. The people in these photographs, despite being my clients, were often unfamiliar to me, as often they were multiple previous versions of them that I didn’t have the privilege to meet. The images felt rich with stories from their lives, yet I knew nothing about them.”
That experience of intimacy and unknowing, of being close to someone whose history you can only partially glimpse, became the organising idea behind her final collection. Once she had named it, she couldn’t unsee it.
Memory, dignity, and the trust people place in care
Working alongside people living with dementia and Alzheimer’s gave Olivia something that no art school brief could have provided. She has a firsthand
understanding of what it means to lose hold of your own story, and she has sat with the weight of that for two years in a way that has shaped everything about how she approaches her practice.
She has been clear about that in her own writing.
“I can’t even begin to imagine how isolating, frustrating and scary it must be battling such confusion and uncertainty daily. The amount of trust they put into the people who are caring for them is such a strength, and I want my work to honour that.”
The desire to honour it is visible in every creative decision she has made. She paints in oils onto canvas and glass photo frames, blurring the images deliberately to introduce ambiguity, to reflect the way memory softens and shifts at the edges. The technique is not decorative. It is the argument the work is making.
A collaboration rooted in care
When Olivia found the courage to reach out to Guardian Angel Carers and share what she was working on, our Chichester branch didn’t hesitate. With the full permission of a client and a CareAngel she joined a visit and photographed the two of them going about their time together, naturally and without interruption. Those photographs became paintings, and those paintings became the heart of her degree show collection, displayed at the University of Chichester’s Fine Art Degree Show in June 2026.
When our team attended the degree show, they came away reminded of something we already believed but rarely see reflected so clearly. The work our CareAngels do reaches further than a visit. It shapes the people who show up to do it, and sometimes, if you are paying close enough attention, it shapes what they make of the world too.
Why this story matters to us
Guardian Angel Carers was built on the belief that care should fit the person, not the other way around. That means seeing the people we support as whole human beings, with histories and identities and lives that extend far beyond their care needs. It means noticing the things others miss. It means going above and beyond, even when no one is watching.
Olivia noticed. She noticed the photographs on the walls and the lives they represented, the stories she would never fully know, the quiet trust that her clients placed in her every time she walked through the door. And she made something from that noticing that asks the rest of us to pay the same kind of attention. That is what good care looks like. And as it turns out, it is what good art looks like too.
We are so proud of you, Olivia. And we are proud that Guardian Angel Carers played a small part in the story that made this possible.
To follow Olivia’s work and see the full collection, find her @olivia_t_studio