For the third part of our Creative Work Shop artist residency programme, Robbie Coleman & Jo Hodges, developed an evocative project to record and reflect upon life during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Titled Northern Exposures, the project sought to investigate how Covid had changed all of our lives over the past six months and altered our sense of time.
For the project, Jo and Robbie invited over 50 local participants to take home a pinhole camera, place it in a window looking out or in their garden and leave it there for two months. The single image that the camera captured documented the movement of the sun through the sky each day, recording the passing of time and place.
Participants were also asked to reflect and comment upon their own personal experience of how that time has passed, with a number logging these thoughts and feelings as longform writing, sometimes as a diary, sometimes as poetry.
The project culminated in an interactive installation of images and words in August 2021 as part of Source to Sea, our summer programme of cultural events and activities. A number of these accounts were recorded by the participants and collated as an extended soundtrack, as both collective memory and a communal sharing of time.
About the artists
Robbie Coleman and Jo Hodges are public artists based in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. They have individual art practices but also work in collaboration on transdisciplinary public art works.
Robbie Coleman is an artist and curator with a background in sculpture and live art. He project manages large-scale public arts projects and is Co-Director of the D-LUX Light Festival and The Environmental Arts Festival Scotland.
Jo Hodges is an artist, curator and producer with a background in Human Ecology, community development and social justice.
Jointly their work investigates ecological and socio-cultural systems, processes, relationships and change. Their practice takes many forms and includes temporary and permanent works, site specific installations, socially engaged and participatory processes and explorations of new strategies for working in public space.
Throughout their Creative Work Shop artist residency with Findhorn Bay Arts, Robbie & Jo documented their experience in detail. Read their blog.
