Take a Billycan for a walk and focus on making, ART!!
Ok, its now the beginning of Term 2, everything has been turned on its end and I am now teaching online a Visual Arts course [digitally] for 12 -18 years olds.
We have been asked to return to the classroom to teach all online as the students stayed at home. Like all of us, I was anxious and apprehensive in returning to the work place.
Everyday for the past 60 days I have carried this can with me to document being here, being present. These drawings are my embodied experience during this time, cut out from the centre of a book that in itself will become an artwork, or at least a good place to hide shit in that big hole I have cut out of each and every page…. Cause really who is going to go to my shelf and say “Hey look, I think I’ll read how to Stay Calm and Stay Healthy!!!”
Self-help books were my Father’s go to, he had purchased many from Readers Digest over the years!
before he past, he had bought this same book [that had been repackaged by reader’s digest more than once] ‘Stay Calm, Stay Healthy’ he bought
4 times, I thought that was a sign!!
So it starts with ‘How to stay Calm and Stay Healthy’ no mention of how to deal with a pandemic!!! I read on, then decide to use this as my paper for M.A.D.E Walking Billycan drawings, in fact a better use for the text, this is what they look like.
I did this to Stay Calm and Stay Healthy and to counteract day-to-day pressures of returning to the work place during a pandemic! Not sure if I was holding any helm no matter what the sea, I just knew I was anxious, worried and frightened. I could only imagine how other more vunerable than me were dealing with the situation. Plus didnt want to go anywhere woutside my house.
Above are the first 14 days, obviously I hadn’t moved much I went to work, sat infront of a comoputer for 6 hours and I came home that was the day.
Not sure why some of these are loading sideways or blurry but it pretty much sums up the limited movement, yet nervous energy I was creating and sharing that through my body into the drawing, in the can!
There was one exceptional day when I took the very excited dogs for a walk on the beach. It was so energised the pen broke and this is the result.
