At the beginning of
the COVID-19 lockdown, I set up a small desk in my bedroom as a makeshift
studio. Armed with a set of newly acquired Winsor Newton artist’s-quality
watercolours and a stack of Fabriano postcard paper books, I set myself
the task of completing one painting a day.
My partner’s father,
an archaeologist by profession, had left us with piles of old National
Geographic magazines; each one full of their remarkable photographs. Daily,
I thus selected an image that resonated to inspire a small watercolour that
reflected my internal state.
The chosen images were
mostly of single human beings, dwarfed by the vastness of implacable natural
settings, in places that evoke the experience of the Sublime. These were always challenging
environments: places too severe for human habitation, potentially
life-threatening situations. I was
grateful to the brave image-authors for bringing spaciousness to the constraint
of lockdown. Several images fell outside this theme, but since they also
somehow commented truthfully on my everyday experience, I included these as
well.
On the reverse of the
postcards (where address and message are normally written), I give thanks to my
inspiration by referencing the ‘address’ of the image: the article
title, edition, page number and the photographer.
I realized I also
needed a ‘message’ to send to the imagined ‘recipients’ of my
postcards. A friend, John Higgins, was coincidently working on a lockdown
writing project of his own.
As a writer and
academic, John has long been interested in the question of montage – in film,
visual media and in writing. As
Lockdown took hold, John says he found himself, “like many people, obsessively
reading about the COVID-19 pandemic and trying to find ways to deal with the
strange combination of emotional and informational overload in the enforced
freedom from the usual structuring routines of work.” As something of an active
response to the increasingly eerie situation, he began to assemble a number of
montage texts.
These brought together
and set against each other, fragments of national and international news
coverage and commentary with other varied readings from his day. The sources
from which the textual fragments were torn included media coverage from radio,
television, and online sources such as Daily Maverick, The Guardian,
the Washington Post and the New York Times; Li Edelkoort’s Business
of Fashion podcast; and (dusted off and taken down from the bookshelves)
Sir Edmund Burke Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the
Sublime and the Beautiful (T. Noble: London 1845); Plato Protagoras and
Meno (Penguin: Harmondsworth 1956); John Ruskin Modern Painters Volume 1
(Dent: London 1935); John Ruskin The Stones of Venice (George Allen:
London 1906).
John Higgin’s written ‘messages’ and my images have come together as joint postcards sent each day from the uncharted inner depths ‘visited’ across forty nights and days of lockdown.
John Higgin’s written ‘messages’ and my images have come together as joint postcards sent each day from the uncharted inner depths ‘visited’ across forty nights and days of lockdown.
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