The Art of Staying Home, with Julie Cockburn

Firstly how are you feeling today?

I feel ok this morning, although my mood changes hourly; I fluctuate between denial and disbelief as to the gravity of the corvid-19 pandemic, to full on Armageddon and ‘the end of the world as we know it’. (I find myself humming the REM song of the same title intermittently throughout the day).

Tell us about your art and your studio.

I generally work on small scale, hand crafted collages and embroidered photographs. I use found photos, sourced from car boot fairs, specialist dealers and online marketplaces, and add a layer of interpretation using my own visual language. The interaction with these found objects is like entering into a conversation with something that already has plenty to say.

My studio is a small white space in my home. It’s at the back of my house so it feels separate and I have to ‘go’ there, a bit like going to work. It has a north-facing window, so the light is beautiful to work in, and a door out to the garden. I tend to listen to audio books or Radio 4 throughout the day. My work is very time consuming, so I need to go into a work zone in my head – the rhythm of the spoken word helps me do that.

Do you normally work from home?

Yes. I do a lot of preparatory work on the computer – finding images to work with online and sketching my designs in Photoshop onto a scanned facsimile of a photograph I want to work into. My studio is a messy place – it’s great to be able to close the door on that disarray at the end of the day.

How has your day to day life changed since COVID-19?

To be honest, not really very much. I live on my own with my sweet dog Jean who I walk in a beautiful meadow nearby in the morning and then work from home as normal. So it’s more a psychological shift – I realise how much ‘stuff’ I just don’t need.

I am, of course, concerned about how I am going to make any money this year – all the galleries I work with have closed for the foreseeable future, and art fairs and exhibitions have been postponed so it’s a worrying time to be an artist.

What are you doing creatively to stay calm and mindful?

I am continuing to work – I am optimistically hoping that my show planned for September at The Photographers’ Gallery is going to go ahead in some form, but I am not pushing myself. I am spending time in my garden too - there is something very calming about tending to a plant and listening to the birds sing.

I think it’s important not to get too overwhelmed with the news and I try not to listen to more than I need to. The pandemic is all consuming, and I find that my only option is to come back to where I am now. To be here, now. I don’t meditate or anything, but it’s a powerful tool if you can just be with yourself in the moment.

Do you have any creative ideas for people to do at home?

How about some Japanese boro? Creative mending, what’s not to like!

What do you think the world will have learned from this?

How important being healthy is. How important our National Health Service is. How dependent we are on each other. How little anything else really matters. Perhaps also that the world just kicked us back, rightly so, and that we really need to do things differently in the future if we are going to survive.