A creative lockdown activity developed for Suffolk Artlink, Make Do & Friends project: a programme of creative and social activities for Over 55s living in isolated and rural locations.
This activity invites people to creatively share what they notice growing on their individual patch of earth in the first week of May. With the contributions I intend to produce an artwork to be shared online as a wider view of Suffolk in bloom, a way of experiencing our landscape at a time when we have little freedom of movement.
I imagine a digital map with the images submitted transformed into digital collages imitating the shape of the villages on a traditional OS map. This approach proves frustrating, although I generally work between digital and analogue, the work I’m now producing feels flat and irrelevant.
I think about the digital material and how I can work with it to make a sensory experience, an immersion into rural Suffolk.
I start to physicalise the images placing them back into an outdoor environment then bringing them to life with film editing and sound.
I’d like to explore this idea further, I feel the restrictions of lockdown working are highlighting something in the relationship between digital and the real world that I hadn’t properly understood before.
How do we use online platforms, digital techniques and other forms of communication to engender the social experience of working with an artist in a village hall in rural Suffolk. Like many people, I’ve sought the personal and local experiences online, gravitating to known groups. I wonder how we give an online space a real sense of ‘local’.
Jac Campbell 