I’m an artist based in North Tyneside living just outside the Newcastle upon Tyne city boundary. I am a studio holder at The NewBridge Project in Gateshead, and an active member of The NewBridge Project Programme Committee.
Before all of this, before Boris arrogantly shook hands with everyone, before 5G towers got brutally pulled down in Birmingham and Liverpool, before Tim Martin told his staff to apply for jobs in Tesco, before lockdown, before Covid-19, I’d been planning for a period of self-imposed isolation.
In late 2019, I received a modest research grant that enabled me to plan for a period of a few months where I’d be free from both work and social obligations. I’d organised myself so that this period would begin at the end of March 2020, what I couldn’t have anticipated was how such a large portion of the world’s population would be joining me.
I’m interested in this space (and time) that the pandemic has aggressively thrust upon many of us. What habitual patterns it may have diminished and what alternate concepts or rhythms have emerged in their place. How our ruptured concept of ‘normal’ may offer us many surprising, and perhaps pre-existent or hidden, relationships, concepts and ecologies.
As an artist I regularly work in collaboration with many others: most notably with artist Toby Lloyd as artist duo Lloyd-Wilson, and alongside journalists and charitible organisations (among others) as We Are Our Media and The Eclipse, a peer-led approach to tabloid journalism.
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