Lockdown Stories #01

L O C K #01

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CONT ENTS

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Contents

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Welcome to Lockdown Stories

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Ethan Yandall & Shauna Lowrey

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Andrea Motta

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Finn Edwardson

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Taome Hanson

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Georgina Boden

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Oliver Hurst

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Sam Stevens

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Sevim Yildiz & Georgia Goddard

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Susanna Amato

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Ru Gilfillan

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WELCOME TO LOCKDOWN STORIES In March 2020 the country closed down. We were told to stay at home, not travel, not meet family and friends and not wander too far from our homes.

This sudden change in everyone’s lives, including our students, was bound to be difficult and challenging. At the same time, it was to be a period of continued creativity. Bedrooms turned into studios, airing cupboards became recording studios and kitchens formed the vlogging backdrops.

In an effort to capture and showcase this creativity, we put a call out to our students to see what they were making and producing in reaction to lockdown. We received over 50 responses which you’ll see throughout the pages in this series of zines. We have collected artwork, podcasts and short films amongst other inspirational outputs to share with our Salford School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology community to reflect on the exceptional circumstances we found ourselves in and to remind ourselves that creativity still thrives in the most difficult of times.

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Ethan Yandall: Lair

2ND YEAR BA (HONS) MEDIA AND PERFORMANCE

It’s an experimental short film on using themes of film noir and on the claustrophobic atmosphere of self-isolation and anxiety that comes from it. It has affected my creativity greatly!

Watch ‘Lair’ here.

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Shauna Lowrey: Stayin at home 2ND YEAR BA (HONS) GRAPHIC DESIGN

My work focuses on the fun aspects of staying at home, I want my design to bring abit of fun and lightheartedness to remind everyone the positives we are all doing by staying at home.

During the pandemic I’ve learnt to try keep a positive mindset, I have a lot more free time to focus and create more work.

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Andrea Motta: Derivative Comics #1 - #2 2ND YEAR BA (HONS) GRAPHIC DESIGN @OSALVEJ Superheroes comic books are something that always driven my creative practice, but as a medium, they are not anymore in their prime. Nowadays they are mostly relegated to subsidiary of big budget movies without their own identity as a popular culture literature. With a series of short stories I wanted to experiment on storytelling by just focusing on the names of famous characters, removing their known and commercial identity. This is one of them.

I started writing stories last summer but I never start thinking about them or do them until the lock-down started and I felt I needed to use my time to create some creative work to cope with the craziness outside. I went mostly physical with the creation of the pages, using marker pens, pencils and paper. Since I had plenty of time to experiment, I wanted to do something that I never truly explored and it is an exciting (yet fumigating) experience, something that I will certainty will carry on doing.

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Finn Edwardson: normal

2ND YEAR BA (HON) COSTUME DESIGN @FINNTIPP

It’s a digital painting of the last “normal” photo/selfie that I took before everything really fell apart. I was on my way home, I was cold and tired, it was raining and there was a drunk man on the train yelling about how the virus was all made up and some other racist nonsense. It wasn’t nice, or comfortable, and I couldn’t wait to get off the train - but it felt normal.

Prosopagnosia was a contributing factor too. Faces are difficult at the best of times, and now everyone is (supposed to be) wearing masks it’s even harder to tell people apart - although I suppose now other people might have to appreciate that it’s not always easy to recognise people.

I have ADHD and it’s been hell trying to stay focused on anything, way more so than usual. Nothing is engaging me. I’ve started lots of new projects and finished barely anything - loads of ideas but no sticking power, and the endless existential dread and anxiety means that I just feel too numb to do anything a lot of the time. I keep settling down to do something, anything, and just end up staring at blank pages and getting increasingly restless unless something really grabs at my attention.

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Taome Hanson: lockdown series 3RD YEAR BA (HONS) FILM PRODUCTION

Since lockdown started I have been going around my town, documenting images that capture the feeling of quarantine, from shops being shut, queues outside supermarkets and empty streets. This photo series captures an eerie vibe of what it’s like when everyone is stuck inside.

I feel the coronavirus crisis has actually improved my creativity as I now have more time for creating work without other distractions and have felt influenced to produce art focused around the pandemic.

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Georgina Boden: When life gives you lemons... I dunno they’re Orange segments.

1ST YEAR BA (HONS) FINE ART @GEORGIE.PAINTS

As it is Summer (ish), I decided to create a series of acrylic on canvas influenced by the aesthetics of summer, such as fruit.

I decided to create this colourful, bold piece that captures the fun and spirit of Summertime. The name is a playful take on the popular saying, which given the circumstances of lockdown, adds an element of humour to the situation.

I feel that the corona crisis has encouraged my creativity to occupy myself throughout lockdown, as one can only clean your house so many times!

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Oliver Hurst: 2m

2ND YEAR BA (HONS) THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE PRACTICE

2m is a play-text heavily inspired by the works of contemporary British Theatre makers, such as Sarah Kane and Simon Stephens.

The play focuses on displaying uncensored emotion, magnified through the lens of isolation. By experimenting with unconventional form, the text reads more as a journal than a traditional play.

Regarding my creativity, the coronavirus crisis has been a double edged sword. It has given me the time to reflect on prior work, thus inspiring me to create ‘2m’. Furthermore, the time spent alone heavily inspires the constant themes running through the text.

However, due to strict distancing limitations it has removed collaborative pportunities, which I find vital to my creative process.

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Sam Stevens:

how to stay indoors 2ND YEAR BA (HONS) PHOTOGRAPHY @SAM.FFOTO

I was lucky enough to be quarantined with my girlfriend and not alone. We spend our days waiting for the sun, doing puzzles & playing video games. The sun is our source of inspiration, for neither of us can work without it. I live the life of a recluse on most days, but now to be forced further in to my ways it has shown me that time outside is necessary.

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Sevim Yildiz

Nature’s Forgotten Pollinators MA WILDLIFE DOCUMENTARY PRODUCTION @BECURIOUSBEINGSPODCAST

This is a story about the Forgotten Pollinators that work quietly in the back to ensure ecosystems run smoothly.

It has affected my creativity slightly but having control on what I produce and being able to create something from nothing or very little has helped me understand the finer things in life.

This will allow me to practice my filming skills and allow me to develop these qualities later on in my filming career.

Watch ‘Nature’s Forgotten Pollinators’ here.

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Georgia Goddard Barbarian Girl

3RD YEAR BA (HONS) GAMES DESIGN AND PRODUCTION

At first my creativity was stumped and terrible, but eventually I found that I could actually find more time to work on pieces. I have taken this time to experiment with my work and learn more about different digital art styles.

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Susanna Amato: Once This Is Over

ALUMNI OF BA (HONS) PERFORMANCE DRAMA AND THEATRE @oncethisis_over During the Coronavirus pandemic my creativity has been affected by lonliness and a stalemate with job losses, although being stunted I have turned my attention to my community and trying to create bonds and bring people together.

I live between Rusholme and Moss Side, Manchester; areas tarnished with destructive images. Yet, both suburbs support vibrant and diverse communities.‘Community’ can broadly be defined as: a unified body of individuals having a sense of trust, belonging, safety and care. During a time of crisis, such as the current coronavirus pandemic, a sense of belonging and care is more important than ever.

I want to reinvigorate what community means and I believe this can be done through poetry and imagery; asking participants to document their individual experiences can help others to process their own struggles with this once in a lifetime situation. We will all have a different personal journey through this situation, but by sharing and learning from each other, we aim to develop a collective voice for the community. I have asked 10-20 participants to take photographs for two weeks and/or complete the sentence: “Once this is over...” to create a mass poem.

The call-out is open to all, and ensuring accessibility for a diverse range of participants is essential to the work. The project needs to reflect the abundance of diverse characteristics in these communities and, in doing so, highlight similarities where previously only difference was seen.

Alleyways in these areas are shared between streets, but rarely utilised. I would like these areas to become intimate, non-intrusive, gallery spaces; inviting residents to interact with the final poem and images on display, in both visual, digital and audio formats.

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The crisis has affected my creativity by taking away all the excuses I had to just experiment and for it to not matter if I didn’t like what I made. In the past, I have found it very difficult to sit down and experiment with new things because I felt as though if I had nothing to show at the end of it then it had been time wasted.

When university was suspended and I was furloughed from my job seven days later, I saw this as a chance to just sit in my “studio”, my Peel Park Room, for several hours, and if nothing came of it then I could just try again tomorrow. Similarly, I was a little intimidated by the suspension as we had just started our classes for our next major project and the loss of in-person teaching made me very anxious that I would not be able to get a grade I could be proud of.

In practicing at experimenting, I released this more relaxed side of me that had been buried beneath the myth that you have to be productive at all times. Ironically (or maybe obviously, in hindsight) as a result of this, I created some of my favourite work.

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Ru Gilfillan: sicknote

1ST YEAR BA (HONS) CREATIVE MUSIC TECHNOLOGY @electricboogaru soundcloud.com/rugilfillan

‘sicknote’ is a piece of art I created it in the first few weeks of lockdown when experimenting with recording in my PPQ room because the studios were closed. I like to think of it as a musical painting, because my original compositional intent was to write a rock song on guitar, which I hadn’t done for a while. I simply wanted it to not sound like it was recorded in my room.

When writing on guitar I am heavily influenced by psychedelic and rock music, particularly the band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and their approach to genre aka it doesn’t matter. In the end, my experiments with synthesizers for an upcoming assignment started to fit really nicely: blending guitars and synths is something the artist EDEN does expertly, and his creation of soundscapes in his songs has always been something I’ve aspired to do.

I love the end result because when you compare it to my original aims for writing something, I feel as though what happened instead was almost stream of consciousness. It gave me a new outlook that you don’t have to make your creativity fit into a box if you don’t want to.

When you are making something, I believe you should absolutely just make whatever you love. If no-one else likes it, who cares! You still get to enjoy it!

Listen to ‘sicknote’ here.

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