Covid: Response Newlyn Cornwall
During the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange in Cornwall, @newlynexchange invited all people from any location, via social media, to share their thoughts, emotions and experiences in any medium they wished on sheets of A5 card and send them to the gallery for exhibition. Covid: Response Newlyn Cornwall.
Extraordinary Postcards for Extraordinary Times
Home interiors and exteriors, landscape scenes, animals and birds, flowers and trees, abstract and figurative, comic and serious. Depictions of the present the past and hopes of the future.
Paintings, drawings, photographs, cut-outs, pen and ink. Some showing artistic skill but most the result of enthusiastic but not necessarily talented hands. It didn’t matter, in fact the more basic the more powerful it seemed. The works were thoughtful, spontaneous, simple and complicated, obvious through to those needing a little more interpretation.
All telling a personal, family, society and community story in simple images and a few words.
This was an exhibition of art at its best: at work pragmatically for the benefit of the creator and the viewer. The opportunity for self-expression without judgement, without qualification or question. For thoughts, emotions, hopes, desires, fears, anxieties and humour to be illustrated and displayed for all to see and reflect upon and enjoy with no recrimination.
The exhibition really speaks loud and clearly that we are all in this together. It encourages and invites examination and reflection of one’s own situation and attitudes, circumstances, practicalities, dreams and indeed nightmares. From introspection to open expression for all to feel and participate.
As a work demonstrating the very best of an outcome of community art, it couldn’t be more powerful and is to be recommended for any society to have a go at achieving in these dire times.
All the postcards are available for viewing on the Gallery’s website and I understand a hard copy publication is also being considered.
Newlyn Art Gallery and The Exchange
Covid: Response Newlyn Cornwall