Isolation Windows

During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, I have collected images of people’s windows in isolation. Using social media and connections with friends and friends of friends, I have managed to collect images from across the globe. In the short amount of time that I carved out to paint in, I have been making small gouache paintings from the photos. It has given me a rhythm and project in this topsy- turvy time. It allows me to visit other people’s houses, other countries, other continents, albeit in my imagination, and ponder our shared global experience. “This act of shared imagining is timely, offering sensations of closeness with friends and strangers alike. Though actual human figures never find their way into her paintings explicitly, they are ever-present by implication, through traces of everyday actions: the top of a chair tucked under a table, a towel drying on a railing, a window left ajar, a curtain hurriedly not-quite-drawn. These domestic objects and adornings become proxies for the absent humans; the scenes as a whole, like still-life glimpses into the lives of others.” Extract from essay “A view of one’s own” by Lizzie Lloyd, 2020