Hayley Jones

When lockdown happened, various personal situations saw my family life and mental health thrown up in the air. I could not support family members I did not live with and everything just felt really out of control. I have been using celebrities as my subject matter for the last two years, they are icons, but they suddenly felt so distant, so irrelevant. The combination of the pandemic and family events brought sharply into focus what was really important in my life and saw subsequent changes to my art practice.

Lockdown meant that nobody was meant to leave the house, so all contact,
all life outside of my house appeared on some sort of rectangular screen, be that a phone or Tv. I started to photograph little things I noticed through a cardboard box. At a time when we were supposed to be social distancing, I craved proximity. I found that taking the time to slow down and take these photographs through a cardboard box brought me little moments of peace at a time I felt that I was spinning out of control. No longer trying to escape the humdrum of everyday life, I intended on capturing every beautiful moment.

I began to attach narratives to the images, such as the triptych of images called Living in a Box, which has a particular focus on insects as a metaphor. The First image is of a bumble bee, symbolic of how we as humans were busily going about our business, focusing on work. The second image is of a fly, which represents the fly in the ointment for when we are all put into lockdown. Lastly, the third image has a big yellow flower, to represent focusing on the positives, but if you look closely you see all of the tiny little insects trying to overtake the flower, which are symbolic of all of the problems and worries that our mind has been trying to contend with.

 

 


 

 

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