The World Outside
works inspired by and created during Covid-19 lockdown 27 -30 May 2021
The last year has been like nothing we have ever experienced. Everything normal seemed to enter a state of stasis, unpredictability, apprehension and looking out of the window. This body of work has been a sporadic flux of creativity separated by episodes of listlessness, gazing and deep thought. It is united by a renewed relationship with The World Outside |
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
Keats.
Keats.
We patronise the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they are more finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.
Henry Beston The Outermost House, 1928.
Introduction
The recent restrictions placed upon us due to COVID-19 whilst having kept us prisoner in our own homes has also given us the opportunity to engage in looking out as it were: to slow down and notice the world outside. In May 2020 a survey conducted by YouGov on behalf of the RSPB titled: Recovering together 1. found that 63% of adults canvased saw nature as important for health and wellbeing and access to nature close to home as beneficial during the Coronavirus crisis. 81% agreed they had felt happier whilst/after spending time visiting nature.
Billie Bond says; for me my confinement has forced me to re-evaluate my place in the larger scheme of things and in particular to re-assess mankind’s place within nature as a whole.
By slowing down and looking out we find time to notice the other world that is not contingent upon us. Bond relates to this notion, commenting, Looking at the world outside our cage we notice another world and cease to be so self-obsessed. By slowing down and looking at nature through the bars of our separating cage we see things differently. These thoughts lie at the core of the conception of works in the Isolation series which invite us to visually engage and intellectually ponder these themes. With the work Sanitatem Flores nature is visualised as part of the healing process helping us to mentally and literally put ourselves back together with the aid of nature’s healing power.
Looking out despite the cataclysm that is even now affecting humanity the natural world goes on as before. There is even evidence that wildlife is taking the opportunity to recolonise the natural world and man-made parks and gardens in our absence. This raises the question: would the natural world be better off without us? Bond contemplates this question with the work Perpetual. She says, Our biggest threat is ourselves. Perhaps once we have gone nature will find solace again.
Throughout this exhibition of figurative work Bond is skilfully asking us to re-evaluate and meditate on the abstract notion of what it is to be human, and further; what is humanities place within, and connection to, nature.
Ironically by taking the cue from Bond’s work and watching, noticing nature more, we may find the freedom to be more our natural selves, even more human perhaps?
Terry Flower
1. Recovering Together, field work undertaken 14-15 May 2020 by YouGov on behalf of RSPB.
Emily Williamson StatueDuring lockdown, coincidentally, I was lucky enough to be shortlisted and commissioned to create a bronze maquette of Emily Williamson A campaign to honour the RSPB's forgotten founder with a statue at her home, Fletcher Moss Park. For birds, for nature activism, for the next generation. The workings of my proposal of the Emily Williamson Statue campaign will also be on display, including the silk Victorian bustle dress, the Victorian taxidermy exotic bird hat with ostrich plumage and clay maquette of the Emily Williamson Statue. |