50 Days of Lockdown
Here in New Zealand we experienced 50 days of lockdown for Covid19.
The first 33 days we had some of the strictest rules in the world at level 4. The only thing open were grocery stores and gas stations. No restaurants – not even for take away (aka carry out.) Pretty much you had to cook your own food.
We moved to level 3 on April 28 as we had successfully flattened the curve. This was essentially lockdown with McDonalds. And shops could open if they could do contactless payment and delivery of goods.
On May 14 we moved to level 2 after several days with 0 new cases. We can now travel, eat in restaurants with friends with 0 new cases being the trend for most days now.
50 days of lockdown.
My Personal Documentation Project
As I noted back when this started, this is a notable time in history and I wanted to capture my experience with a simple sketch each day.
While I had planned on sharing my progress as things went along I didn’t get around to it. Blogging wasn’t high on my todo list.
As with many (most?) of you, I found it particularly challenging to focus on serious work some of the time. Other times, I got a lot done.
Some days I skipped the sketching and just made a note of what I wanted to capture.
And then at the end – I stopped sketching all together because my mom, in a nursing home in Pennsylvania, became ill. Things weren’t looking good when the conversation turned to hospice. While she has never tested positive for covid, she had very similar symptoms.
And then she got better. The day after our lockdown ended, she was back up and walking around.
So I completed my sketch this week and here I share the progress of the drawing on days 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50.
My Observations
A few observations (in no particular order) and then then sketches.
- Many of the days I wrote about food. Not surprising given the disruption to our usual methods of getting food.
- Many days the event of note was a walk. We had beautiful autumn weather and spent more time walking on the beach during these 50 days than we did all of 2019. Making time for the things that really matter was a nice feature of lockdown.
- Although not really captured in this project, my work life really did not change much because I already work from home. This caused some stress for me because I wanted to relax and enjoy the slowness of the world but I also had a lot of work to do for the classes I teach and running the MakeBigArt Community.
- The last few weeks I have fewer sketches and more patterns and rambling lines and marks as we were processing and dealing with my mom’s illness. There isn’t really an image I want to associate with that.
- I like puzzles.
- We watched a lot of netflix. Tiger King was highly entertaining if not completely nutty. We’ve now run out of things to watch and we’ve moved on to podcasts and audio books.
My final observation is that I feel very fortunate to be living in a country that has essentially eliminated the virus and I have little to no fear that I will catch it being out and about in the community.
For those of you living in countries where the risk is still high and the fear is valid – sending you love. It is a challenging situation. I am still worried about my mom. This time she was fine. But the risk is still there.
Stay healthy everyone.
While this is what it looks like today. I’ll probably go back in and add some more patterning and dividers between the days to make it look more like art and less like a very hard to read collection of words.
Or maybe I won’t. The purpose with this was not a work of fine art, but to instead document my experience.