I can usually be found out there paddling, camping, biking, running, swimming, foraging, hiking, pretty much anything not contained by walls, or under a roof. The last few weeks have been like becoming an indoor cat, and not by choice. It can feel like imprisonment, or safety, depending on the day. During the pandemic, our experience of places and people has been mediated by screens of so many kinds, including cellphones. A shattered screen breaks the illusion of there being a real space, and people, and animals, and landscapes beyond this little window. The cracks remind me that it’s just a fragile object filled with electronics, and glass, and electromagnetic fields. These months of isolation will pass eventually, and my screen will be repaired, and our world will shift from virtual to real again. The meaning of a broken screen will have changed though. It will always remind me of how captivity feels, and how I latched on to any glimpse of freedom so eagerly.
Lisa Neighbour, Watercolour and acrylic paint April 2020
