What helped you get through the most recent lockdown?

I turned to music and had the radio on for most of the day, every day! I found music provided a much needed form of escapism.

In my current practice I am exploring the act of making art as a liberating gesture.  The various positive sensations of pleasure, calm, elation and catharsis that listening to music gives me, as I paint and draw in my studio, collide and combine with all the other sensations I am experiencing at that moment and are translated directly into my painting. From music – to my body and mind’s response – to the painting, to the viewer experiencing the work, is a chain of sensations. These chains of sensations connect us to each other and help us make sense of our realities, as Haruki Murakami explains so eloquently here:

“Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality-call it an alternate reality-to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw. Therefore, in order to pin down reality as reality, we need another reality to relativize the first. Yet that other reality requires a third reality to serve as its grounding. An endless chain is created within our consciousness, and it is the very maintenance of this chain that produces the sensation that we are actually here, that we ourselves exist.”

Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

You can see a painting I made about this on the cover of the latest issue of Savage Journal, Issue #13 Sensation. Savage Journal is UCL’s Arts and Culture Journal – Read it online or pick up a copy for free from the UCL campus.