All in Resilience
How do you express your stories, and how do you document your daily life, the personal and social times in which you live? If you look at the great writers and artists, their work was a product of the times. Documenting an I Was Here moment is in the patchwork squares of Victorian artist Nicole Kemp’s Covid Quilt, a visual story of 2020.
When you are at home is self-isolation, how do you mark time? In the Middle Ages the marking of time was both cosmological and seasonal. Can we turn crisis into opportunity and document our days with creative activity?
When you’re feeling unhinged and not quite in touch with your inner self, look around for the tools you have to hand to put some structure back into your life. This helps turn experience into beauty, transforming the chaos into poetic metre, a daily ode to life told line by line, word by word, image by image.
When the world went into lockdown and my travel plans were cancelled, I brought the world to me. The view outside my window became a portal into the chaotic world outside and my daily lives on social media helped inspire others to keep creating through crisis. I learnt that home can be the best source of inspiration.
As the world outside my window goes round in circles of chaos, I have been creating circles of connection, a theme which I have taken into my larger works including making a huge world of paper last week in the Imagine Peace Activation.
The Marigold Antidote, it’s medicine for the soul when it feels weary and is suffering from general malaise. Finding joy in the day is the active ingredient. Like marigolds in flower, that sunny splash or orange inspires painting and writing. Creative antidotes to pandemic days.
How do we imagine the future? I have been making a new world of my own imagination, filled with rich blues and greens. I believe that we are holding the world together while a new one is in creation. We bear witness and hold hope while the world is created anew.
While we can’t travel during social lockdown, we can armchair travel. Use this time to document your experiences during the pandemic, however gruelling it is. For it will never come again, just like I will never travel in a horse and cart again. Join me while we Armchair Travel to transform our experiences and travel into art.
With all the terrible news of escalating deaths around the world, I feel the need to go within, to remember to give thanks and to laugh. I have created a fractal map to colour in and created quirky characters with them for a bit of fun. It’s my way to revitalise my daily arts practice and keep me on track while the world spins crazily out of control.
I am creating portals, circular windows of opportunity for people as they awaken to remember who they truly are. I stitch jigsaw pieces of the world with parachute lines of safety as we drift together through turbulent clouds of uncertainty.
