Layby: how some of the best art collections in the world have been made.
PARENTHESES
[the lockdown series ]
These artworks [word and image combined], are my response to the time we as New Zealanders spent in lockdown level 4, due to the global Covid 19 crisis. I’m right now working on turning all these images into a book, to be published later in 2020.
I made this from the Day 1 , Day 2 and Day 33 artworks because I felt the need to wrap this “one day at a time” project up, to make an “end” to this series that means a lot to me, is such a personal illustration of a very important five weeks in my life/our lives.
11.59pm tonight marks the end of the Level 4 lockdown in NZ.
Man, we’ve been through some stuff in the last 33 days.
It’s Anzac Day here in New Zealand, a day when we as a country stand together to remember the fallen soldiers who fought to give us our freedom , and to honour those who came home. While I 100% respect and agree with the sentiment of the day and am of course thankful to those who gave their lives, I must confess that Anzac Day has no particular personal resonance for me.
I’ve found in my life so far that there is grace to be found in any kind of grief, trauma or illness - if you can find it in yourself to look for it.
This morning, while my partner and I were lying together watching the light brighten through the skylights above our bed, he said such beautiful things to me. I was almost silent as he said his words, paying fierce attention with my head heart body. They’re words I don’t want to forget. This is a feeling I don’t want to forget. So I made this drawing.
After many attempts at making a drawing of something beautiful today, after really wanting to say something lovely and gentle and happy and sweet, it just didn't happen. I drew and drew and drew and nope, nothing worked. I kept going and going until the light went but what I ended up with was this X.
Deep red and rough as guts.
Here we are. United by love. United by blood. United by the things we believe in. Union.
I’m glad I had my silly high-on-sugar party for one yesterday because yesterday evening turned out to be awful. What happened hurt someone I love deeply, and here I am in Wellington in lockdown, unable to go to them. I had literally no sleep last night and I’m feeling wired and exhausted despite the daytime nap I’ve had, and at the same time wishing so badly I had a boxing bag nearby so I can take out some of this fierce feeling on it.
I got high. Strike that. I AM high. God it feels good.
An Almond Magnum. gotten at a dairy which was like a party in my mouth. Whitakers Creamy Milk - 1/4 a large block. A strong Good Fortune coffee from Petone made in our Aeropress. More Creamy Milk.. Yes, I am high on sugar and coffee. And did I forget life?
When you want to be brilliant, incisive and ahead of the game and begin the day making plans for your future and then you put your neck out, have a smacking great headache, and get on the go-slow train.
Because, jesus wept, this lockdown brings you face to face with your self. The headtalk, biases, fears, perspectives, addictions, desires, loves, disappointments: The good, the bad, the excellent and the ugly.
This one’s for the woman I adored right through highschool, Meegan. The words are hers. I took them from a message she sent me the other day. Meegan is literally fighting for her life right now. Battling aggressive cancer in order to stay in this life for her teenage boys.
I made the first iteration of this artwork in 2018, during a difficult period. A time where I was feeling hemmed in by the small quietness of my life. I wrote the words as a reminder that there was beauty in my ordinary everyday, despite the corner I felt backed into. It was a case of write it down and make it so. The poem is also a loveletter to my home, the town I lived in, and to this country of ours.
I had the most amazing conversation this afternoon with a young woman who I’d like to call a friend, and is also a relation in the modern sense of the word. She had such wise advice to give me over something I was finding deeply troubling.
When I was a child and upset, I’d rub the fabric of a blanket between my finger and thumb. It gave me such comfort. I’d do it if I was sad or scared, sick or in hospital for an operation. I particularly liked the ones with satin edging at the top - the smooth feeling contrasted with the rough of the blanket gave me particular pleasure. Gave me something beautiful to hold on to.
Been trying so hard to hold on to who I was before. How I did things before. But, in so many ways, “before” no longer matters.
That’s what this lockdown is.
Parentheses.
There’s a life before, a life after, and right now we’re inside the brackets, existing in a slow limbo.
It’s been an excellent and fairly lazy Sunday. Reading. A long and beautiful walk. Excellent food. A couple of hours watching Succession on Netflix. Always in the background though, behind the day-to-day activity, my mind/heart/gut is working on the very necessary re-imagining of what my life, art, business is going to look like now in this suddenly-changed world of ours.
This one’s for all of you not doing okay.
Those of you who are not, right now: doing yoga, making exceptional plans for the future, doing brilliant WFH, home-schooling your child with ease and grace, soaking up the lazy hazy days of this slowed-down, sweet lockdown life.
For some of you, life right now will be brutal. Difficult. Very very dark. For some of you, some of the time, you’ll feel like you’re in a blood tangle on the floor, trapped inside the nightmare box of your spiralling-downward thoughts.
I just wanted to say: I see you. I’ve been there. I understand. And I’m sorry.
Find whatever/whoever it is that pulls you out of the darkness, whatever it is that helps you see the flicker of light when you’re down deep in that fcking well, and hold onto it for dear life.,
and this too will pass.
A lovely woman, T, messaged me today, thanking me for these wee daily artworks I’m posting, telling me they’re helping her face each day. Each day in which, at the moment, she has “this consuming feeling of sadness” which she feels like is smothering her.
This - edited -was my response:
“…and it’s so natural that you feel overwhelming sadness - there’s so much global collective grief right now. I think the way forward is to walk the line between acknowledging our grief/trauma/emotions, and not getting lost in it.
I woke up heavy and down, despite waking up to my lovely partner. Forced myself to get up and put on my workout gear. Went for a walk around the streets. I began quite tearful, my head full of feeling locked in by the lockdown: fck all this smallness.
All of a sudden, for all of us in New Zealand [and around the world] home means something so much more than it did.
A red cross for all of us who need a bit of care right now.
For the nurses and doctors and all those in essential services, including two of my sisters and my brother.
A red cross for the small grief I feel everytime I pass someone on our daily walk outside, and we move to separate from them, hold the requisite distance. Small griefs that add up to feeling quite tearful by the time I get home.
