HesiTate west barns

Bob Barclay

A YEAR OF LOCKDOWN

Shielding, isolation, social distancing.., all the things that I have been forever
craving, now forced upon us. Time, peace and quiet. Life without distraction, life
uninterrupted with my wife. Our world reduced, time spent together as the
outside crumbled. In fear to begin with, symbolised by the warning sign placed on
the front door to alert people that I am immunosuppressed.
Quickly we understood that we were fortunate living in the countryside, both still
with an income, a garden, ourselves and our dogs to talk to. Time to cherish and
not waste.
It became a time of intense creativity when some five hundred or so drawings were
made.
Drawing was done in bursts, a few at a time, quickly working something out or
reacting to some thought or feeling. I call these drawings, or sketches as this is
traditionally how ideas for art are worked out and this is daily what I have been
trying to do. Drawing as a way of thinking, of viewing the world as a sculptural
response whether physical or emotional. Reacting to taken or found images of
places and landscapes and trying to understand and explain interaction, or lack of,
with daily existence.
Drawing done in the past would involve throwing paint at a canvas, moving
around a space, the space becoming the sculpture or environment itself. A way of
understanding being in a space and appreciating it. Even when making sculpture,
which always exists within, or interacts with, the space and environment where it is
created, the work generates that sense of belonging and knowing how we exist
within that world. Such acts of recording then become journeys to aestheticise and
further explain function, recalling the experience of interaction and the emotions
felt and expressed during that time, within that space. Emotion then becomes
understandable in the context of our being in this world that we have created for
ourselves, a world that lately has been fearful and destructive yet simultaneously
joyous and creative.
The recent experience of lockdown, physically static, creatively expansive, has
resulted in the creation of intimately small digital images created on an iPad and
the realisation that I no longer need to be physically in a specific space elsewhere.
The resulting drawing practises and the works presented act almost as Cognitive
Behavioural Therapy through which thinking has become form. The forms
represent both the place and the emotions of recent times. Colour is equally as
important as form in communicating these ideas, obscuring elements within the
images to suggest our own feelings of being obscured from the world itself, as
though are looking through rain soaked windows.