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Artist Responses

The Community Brain commissioned five artists from a variety of disciplines to respond to the exhibits submitted to The Museum of Today in any way they desired.  They were given access to all the videos and images submitted by all participants and their creative responses are shared below.

I was struck by the ritualistic nature of the exhibits at the Museum of Today. New routines: weekly Zooms with friends, tending to plants. Ritual activities: a special bag to go outside, making pizza dough. The continued and heightened importance of community: Facebook lives, quizzes, socially distanced garden meetings. I spent lockdown in a 25-person warehouse, next to the River Lea. Community activities sustained us. As lockdown continued ad absurdium, our rituals developed in sync. (through) is based on a spontaneous ritual, created at our Swedish Midsummer party. The structure is based on a ‘Midsommarstången’, around which, traditional Swedish and British folk songs and dances were performed. Later in the evening, ‘through the hoop’ was conceived.

It’s been a pleasure to be involved with this very interesting project.

I chose to provide a photograph which best reflects my own interpretation for each project submission.  For me this was a fantastic and time-consuming and fun journey through my extensive photography archives finding which images could best visually interpret the submission wording.  I’m really excited to see the end result.

I was delighted to have been invited to contribute to this wonderful project. I’m a local writer and artist whose work celebrates the language, signs and symbols that help us make sense of our relationships with each other and the time and space we share. 

‘Words for wonders’ celebrates the wonder I found in the tales told by donors of the donations they have made. A series of one-word poems, each responding to one of the wonders in the exhibition.  

This video piece is an expression of the sense of confusion and claustrophobia we are subject to, as a consequence of the lockdown and the conflicting inputs the world and the media around us send us on a daily basis. 

In this new, Covid-stricken, foreign world, all is still and yet so much happens.

"Lockdown One" by Simone Kay

I really enjoyed working with the materials for this piece, putting it together so it resembles a Zoom meeting with 29 people’s ‘wonders’. Watching the videos inspired my choice of glass for copper foiling.  

My own contribution is the encapsulated parakeet feathers inspired by watching Chris Packham and Meghan on Facebook; I leave it for each contributor to spot theirs. It was quite heartening that so many people discovered baking, nature, gardening or favourite objects they looked at in a different way!

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