Click on an image to see each UV Painting and listen to the music track.
Everyone across the world was affected in one way or another by the coronavirus pandemic which emerged in early 2020. Here in Britain, I could see which way the wind was blowing, even before our country's lockdown began in late March. At first I gathered lots of art materials in preparation to spend months working on my current long-term projects, but as we entered the lockdown, the feeling stole over me: these are extraordinary times. Life is completely different now. I should be doing something completely different as well.
Years ago, I used to make electronic music, but when my visual art career began to take off I let it go, and tried to ignore the occasional background tugging at my musical sleeve. Recently, I had also developed an interesting new technique of using a UV lacquer medium that features regularly in my painting practice, and was searching for some kind of creative vehicle to take it forward.
These were the completely different ‘somethings’ I was looking for. I dropped all my other projects and threw myself into painted UV images in the blacklight-illuminated darkness by night, and making strange, soundscaped music by day.
Both practices steadily turned me deeper and deeper inwards, whilst documenting in elliptical detail my emotional and psychological journey. I went from struggling to let go of the world ('Through Glass To Distorted Sunshine') and all its pleasures, through a period of frustrated irritability where days blurred past each other ('Another New Day Starts Then Ends'), into a place where I began to thrive on the silence and the solitude ('Skyful Of Star Trails'). A daily walk in a nearby forest with my husband was my sole contact with the outside world.
Each painting and each musical composition referred to the same inner experiences from different perspectives. ‘Hey Lost Avatar’ expressed my sorrow at the world being pulled away, whilst ‘I Found Still’ emerged from a deep sense of tranquillity that stole over me as the weeks went by.
Eventually a phrase from a joke meme about the quarantine situation began to symbolise the whole experience: Sparkling Isolation. Yes. That’s exactly how my lockdown has been. Wordless, musical, painted sparkling isolation.