CONFINED ARTISTS – FREE SPIRITS
INTRODUCTION
Maryam Eisler
I woke up on April 1st 2020 to another Groundhog Day determined to break routines and come up with an original creative adventure to escape the tedium of isolation.
Art and photography being my greatest passions, I decided to freeze-frame these extraordinary times in lived history, by inviting artists to share their thoughts and insights with a larger community of similar-minded spirits physically confined during the Covid-19 time.
As visual philosophers, and plotters of history, artists have the potential to seek out the soul and essence of the moment. To capture this spirit, I set out (virtually) to photographically capture their moods within the confines of their intellectual or studio spaces. FaceTime and WhatsApp were the mediums used to reach out to multiple individuals across different time zones and cultural barriers. Given the constraints of technology at the time, images are inevitably challenged. Sometimes sharp, other moments less in focus. But always poignant in dialogue and reflection.
This was, understandably, an emotional journey given the new existential challenge which humanity faced at the time. None of us certain that we would each survive nor in what shape society and politics could revive. Leaving aside global health issues unknown at the time. So out with the Human Condition, and Existential Angst–surviving the insanity became paramount.
Hence my aim through capture, imagery, dialogue and poetry, to portray a unique moment in our lives hard lived, now mostly forgotten as a bad dream. Hopefully inspiring hope in renewal
by revisiting our hearts and minds.
What seems to be a common thread in all of the interviews, is the desire for all to come together, to search for our better selves, and to seek a more equitable world order setting aside our cultural and political differences and individual prejudice, if we are to survive other such moments in history, As artists and activists, thinkers and doers, we can each make a contribution by clearheaded analysis and positive creation. Life is complicated enough as it is, let’s try for a little cheer with a creative bent.
As the poet/songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote: ‘There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’. I very much hope this production provides a tiny ray of light on what and who we are as people, and artists.
London, October, 2023