The work I am currently making is in response to being in isolation within my flat, on my own during the Coronavirus Pandemic of 2020. My previous projects have investigated the power of light to transform the everyday, and this thread continues in the images I am currently making. Over the last three years I have moved around the country for work, and I now find myself living in a town in the countryside, far from home, on my own apart from my cat Mollie. When the lockdown was announced, I was relieved from a health point of view as I had been avidly following the news, but about two weeks in I began feeling completely overwhelmed and claustrophobic. The boundaries of my life suddenly seemed to be closing in and my distance from home became more pronounced; I began to make shots instinctively in my backyard and the street I live on. This felt cathartic and as I began to settle into new routines, I found my mind was able to open up to creative thinking, something I miss when I am at work 9-5.

Life is so pressured and stressful that in some ways, despite the huge uncertainty and worry, I have been able to focus on making images as a way of coping and I have felt reconnected with practice. I have instinctively responded to the idea of the light in my space acting as a transformational power over my everyday existence, as this is something I have looked at in previous bodies of work. This lockdown is giving those who are able the time to think and reflect on life, and for me this has meant exploring this place I live in now. I am experimenting with viewpoint, constriction, planes of focus and depth as well as the ordinary and extraordinary in the everyday by looking at how light interacts within the boundaries of this space. The work seeks to look at the internal and the external and our interconnectedness through that space, via light. I have been uploading the images to Instagram and I am finding comfort in the daily rhythm I am forming through making, editing and showing imagery in an almost diaristic way. There is a repetitious nature to the work which is deliberate in terms of subject, theme and curation on Instagram and I shall continue to make these images in a responsive way, as a means of documenting my experience of life under lockdown.

By Verity Adriana

@verityadriana