Janet Kumar

Janet’s Lockdown Story

On Summer Fun Cancelled: ‘This picture is collaged from words and pictures cut from newspapers, magazines and other paper documents. These sources, along with television, online and radio, have provided much of our interaction with the outside world during Covid-19 lockdown. The calendar of the Art Fund events planned for spring 2020 – all exciting, inspiring and carefully organised, and all requiring the presence of groups of people – is the background to the work. Overlaid are shapes that obliterate the descriptions of the events. These shapes roughly suggest the shapes of the Covid-19 virus, and have newspaper headlines that relate to the grim and frightening circumstances of life during the pandemic.’

‘Life in lockdown has been sad and boring, strange and dull, difficult and alarming, frustrating and worrying. It has also made me even more aware of the fragility of the conditions of our lives, and how easily everything we take for granted can disappear.

Making collages has been fun. The selecting and cutting out images is enjoyable, planning and arranging the pictures requires thought and consideration. Some of my collages are comments about the lockdown, some political, some of them are simply fun and make people laugh.

I have not made any collages for many years, probably not since as a child I had a scrapbook.

It is so enjoyable I am continuing to create pictures. Some are from paper ephemera; some are now 3-dimensional, using found objects.’

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