The impact of Covid-19 on artists. Part 3: building communities and finding inner resilience

09/04/20

Part 3: Building communities and finding inner resilience

In the third part of this five-part essay, comprising conversations with artists around the globe, we look at the impact the pandemic – and imposed isolation – is having on them in terms of community and inner resilience

In Italy, the first western country to be badly hit by Covid-19, Francesca Pasquali (b1980, Bologna) describes the situation vividly: “Helplessness, fear, confusion – these are just some of the sensations we’re experiencing at the moment. Some people are gone, others are waiting for a verdict, poised between life and death. Uncertainty walks beside me, beside us, hour after hour, day after day. However, I am convinced that in such a dark and sad period, we must find within us resources and motivation to make sure that everything starts again as soon as possible, with renewed enthusiasm and desire to do. DO! This is the imperative … My doing is in art, my welcoming refuge. I live in the countryside and my studio is a few steps from the house. I see it from the window as soon as I wake up. It just waits to get dirty, to be messed up! I am lucky to be able to continue working, pending receipt of new dates for the exhibitions that have been postponed. Postponed? Cancelled? Who can say with certainty? Today the phone no longer rings, no emails arrive except those that communicate that exhibitions, fairs and other events are postponed. The galleries are inactive; in Italy, culture was the first sector to be affected by closures. But we did not give up, we invented a new way of enjoying art, because the desire to know and see does not subside. Never before have social media and the internet been so vital a means of connection between the isolated self and the whole world. There is fear, it is tangible, but I don’t want to get overwhelmed by emotion. These are the moments in which a sense of community, of union, re-emerges, and the true values that keep a system up and running return. The same values that I try to convey with my work: involvement, activation, sharing, love for beauty. Culture is a common good, essential.”

Read the rest of part three here

Interview with Linda Ingham

25/08/15
Interview: Linda Ingham

Linda Ingham is a visual artist and curator, who exhibits nationally and abroad. She has work in several public collections. Ingham lives and works in her coastal studio in northeast Lincolnshire. The south bank of the Humber estuary has been a constant accompaniment throughout her life, as has the industry and traffic that it supports. The near horizon of the north bank informs much of her imagery, as do the flotsam objects brought to the shoreline. The passage of time, location and place is represented in Ingham’s work through process and systems of recording and the use of materials, such as jet, gathered from the beach; silverpoint and handmade gesso; and collage from antique books. Her drawn and painted constructions are often gathered together as composite pieces and installations, which may change over time. Self-imagery is also a regular feature of her work. Her works for Shifting Subjects include a telephone table containing a book filled with transcriptions of conversations she had with her mother and a pair of profiles, shaped from her cast shadow, filled with the abstracted landscape of the Humber.

Anna McNay: You speak of your work ‘concentrating on place and time through conversation and autobiography’. Is it more a case of using place and time to help define an uncertain and shifting identity, or do you use your identity and sense of self to try to grasp such ephemeral concepts as time and space?

Linda Ingham: I think this depends, as I have used self-imagery in several series. The Profile Pieces became my way back into something alluding to self-portraiture but in which the image of ‘me’ is actually closer to being subtracted; a ‘space’ shaped a bit like me. It is more about using place and time to define identity. I tend towards a depressive nature and swing between putting myself out there and wanting to hide. The collaged elements and stylistic references to my home landscape put something of ‘me’ into the Profile Pieces. I’d like to think that the inclusion of this material in some way resonates and communicates something to the viewer – maybe a sense of authenticity? It doesn’t matter to me that the viewer can’t see what the material is and I don’t think it is necessary to know this in order to have an understanding of the work. I like the idea that not everything within the work is on show; I like the hidden.



You can read the rest of this interview in Aesthetica here.