I've gathered this project together here, although it really just started as instagram posts and me keeping myself entertained/ creative through the early weeks of the pandemic. On reflection, although it looks visually different from my usual work (black and white rather than a focus on colour) the themes that emerge are similar. This is how I've made sense of it:
These images are inspired by the exquisite corpse parlour game first played by the surrealists around the time of the 1918 pandemic. In my interpretation each picture is a self-portrait made up of my silhouette and graphic elements found on my Lockdown daily walks in the suburban landscape around me. Living alone I soon realised the only human form I was seeing on a regular basis was my own shadow. I started making these images using my phone camera and a selection of simple apps at the beginning of the first Covid Lockdown and continued until things returned to some kind of normality in mid 2021. I didn’t leave my postcode during the making of them, and walking became an essential research method as well as therapeutic undertaking. Not having to commute for three hours a day gave me time to play, to think and to look with real intent at the place I used to rush through. The collision of the natural world with the built environment became my fascination, the mundane suddenly appeared remarkable. The history of my area started to reveal itself to me in the architecture and streetscape and made me nostalgic for what seemed like simpler times. These are the consequence, a set of images that reflect the topsy-turvy state of my (our) world in 2021.
These images are inspired by the exquisite corpse parlour game first played by the surrealists around the time of the 1918 pandemic. In my interpretation each picture is a self-portrait made up of my silhouette and graphic elements found on my Lockdown daily walks in the suburban landscape around me. Living alone I soon realised the only human form I was seeing on a regular basis was my own shadow. I started making these images using my phone camera and a selection of simple apps at the beginning of the first Covid Lockdown and continued until things returned to some kind of normality in mid 2021. I didn’t leave my postcode during the making of them, and walking became an essential research method as well as therapeutic undertaking. Not having to commute for three hours a day gave me time to play, to think and to look with real intent at the place I used to rush through. The collision of the natural world with the built environment became my fascination, the mundane suddenly appeared remarkable. The history of my area started to reveal itself to me in the architecture and streetscape and made me nostalgic for what seemed like simpler times. These are the consequence, a set of images that reflect the topsy-turvy state of my (our) world in 2021.
Comments