This body of work was created as part of an online lockdown residency for No Jobs In the Arts, a midlands based community interest project that supports early career artists. The work responds to the prompt of being inspired by home, where we resided during the COVID-19 lockdown. Many of us chose to use different forms of media in order to escape the reality of being confined to the same four walls, which is what the images reflect.
At the end of the project, the bodies of work were exhibited on the Attenborough Arts Centre’s online gallery.
Prompt:
Where can you travel to within your home?
What did you do and why did you do it?
This work utilises appropriated photographic, print and
screen-based material found within the home, layered together through
lens-based methods in order to explore the relationship that many of us have
developed to escapism throughout the pandemic. Primarily stemming from my own
experience of media consumption over the past year, the pieces attempt to
visually portray the chaotic and often multi-faceted nature of these different
types of entertainment. The tension between the old and new, the physical and screen-based,
the textures and shapes are portrayed through the 2D medium of the photograph-
perhaps this itself is a reflection of these made-up worlds of escapism.
How has your relationship with your home changed?
For me home has become a place in which I have been able to
fabricate new ideas. Through the restriction of movement that lockdown has
caused, my largely landscape based practice came to a standstill, along with
lack of access to resources that I was used to. My creativity has been forced
to be approached from an alternate view, in which I was not initially
accustomed to. As the project discusses, finding ways to entertain myself is
also becomes an aspect of these new ideas. The reflection upon the media that I
was consuming and how this informed ideas, as well as how I could use them as
already existing materials, became a large point of reflection over time spent
in the home.