Taking the Lead

Author - Richard Redwin, Monday 24 May 2021

Well, it’s been a weird year.

Some of us didn’t survive it. If you’ve lost someone to Covid, or if someone you love passed away during this pandemic, I am so sorry. In another time or place we could have hugged each other, or sat together in pubs and living rooms and shared something, even if that something was grief.

For those of us still here, 2020, and now 2021, has been a pressure cooker in which we either hardened up, or collapsed inward.

I collapsed, and I didn’t even realise it was happening. Because hey, I had a GREAT lockdown.

Let’s be clear here: I have no kids, I can do a lot of my work from home, I love my girlfriend (moreover she is VERY easy to cohabit with, and doesn’t shout at me even though I consistently wind her up), and most importantly, my teen years as a sad, lonely nerd prepared me for this level of isolation.

In fact when the first lockdown was announced I thought: Great! A chance to catch up on all the projects I’ve been putting off! I’ll finally finish decorating downstairs! I’ll knock out a couple of episodes of that comic I keep talking about! I’ll get better at social media, learn some video game development, maybe make some music, and I certainly won’t drink beer all day every day for months! And I failed on almost every count. But the point is I had PROJECTS, and like a dog with a stick, as long as I had something to chew on, I was a happy boy. Are you starting to see the problem here? We’ll get to it.

March 2020 I had just finished the biggest art commission I’d ever worked on, in terms of scale of the work, the budget, and my responsibilities. ESSENCE, on which I partnered with artist Jodie Gibson, is a series of twelve illuminated sculptures depicting local heroes. It was commissioned by Festival Stoke and launched literally days before the first lockdown – you’ve probably seen pictures of them, or walked past them. (Maybe you even have one in your house right now...)

ESSENCE was meant to be the model for all my future work: public, accessible, socially-conscious art made using reclaimed materials and solar powered lighting. Art so good you just gotta steal it! I was doing things I loved, but in new ways. Moving out beyond my comfort zone.

And then… we all went indoors for a year. The sculptures have now been up in Stoke town centre for fifteen months (about a year longer than planned) and like a grim forecast for my career, they are weathered, crumbling and all the lights have gone out.

OH BOO HOO. WHO CARES? GET A REAL JOB, LOSER.

Yes, obviously all that. And my self pity disgusts me, so I’ll get to the point: Comfort is the enemy of creativity.

Like a lot of other lucky people, I watched the pandemic unfold from the comfort of my living room. More specifically, my sofa, around which I assembled all the tools I needed to work and thrive without actually having to get up. My life became a blur of doomscrolled news reports, tangled cables, and shaking cans to figure out which one still had beer in it. The reality of the crisis barely registered. Covid always seemed to be somewhere else, or happening to someone else. The idea of it hung in the air constantly, with every screen and stream pouring in more information, more numbers, more dead people. But I had projects, so I was fine. I was comfortable on my sofa.

So here’s what I wasn’t doing: I wasn’t calling friends to check on them. I wasn’t pushing myself. I wasn’t doing anything that scared me.

All my ESSENCE momentum was used up, and The Apathy was setting in. I’d finished about seven pages of comic. I was mid collapse, and I couldn’t see it. Until Susan Clarke offered me a project. 

It’s like, you sit in a room for months, right? You breathe the same stale air every day, heavy with heat and gathering dust, and you start to forget what fresh air feels like.

And then one day someone opens a window.

‘Hey, do you want to be Artist Lead on something?’

Why yes Susan, yes I do. That’s how Tomorrow’s Garden started, and it was everything I didn’t know I needed.

Cast your mind back to the end of summer 2020: Eat Out to Help Out had just single handedly saved Britain. Infection rates were down. Experts were predicting another wave but we were ignoring them because frankly we were sick of hearing about it. So we began planning socially distanced events for early 2021…

The first of these would be Tomorrow’s Garden, a self-guided lantern trail through Stoke town that asked the question: ‘What would you leave behind, and what would you take with you?’ This would replace B Arts’ usual run of lantern processions, which traditionally involve lots of people in close proximity, and were therefore a massive and unacceptable risk.

A self-guided trail, on the other hand, seemed perfect. It could be socially distanced, we could train stewards to maintain the audience’s safety, and it could contain all the artwork, narrative and community-driven spirit of a B Arts show, but as a static exhibition. So that’s what we did, and everything went perfectly to plan and there were no issues at all.

Oh no sorry I meant to say: There was another lockdown and we had to change EVERYTHING.

I won’t go into everything that changed here, because if I did I’d be rambling on for days – but to summarise: We done made a film instead.

If you haven’t seen it go watch it now on the B Arts Facebook page or on YouTube! Go on, I’ll wait. Everyone did such great work on the project and I hope I get to write some more about it soon because my team deserves so much credit. Much more than me, in many cases, even though I personally put my name at the top of the credits (cheeky perk of doing the edit). And I’m sure I’ll soon be waxing lyrical to funders about all ways the project benefited our artists, our audience, and our communities…

But here, I want to talk about what Tomorrow’s Garden did for me:

I got to hear the stories and perspectives of other people surviving lockdown and isolation. I got to hear the things they wanted to leave behind, or had already lost, and the things they were bringing with them. I saw love and creativity, sadness, gratitude and hope.

I finally called friends to check on them. I pushed myself. I did things that scared me.

It dragged me off my sofa, made me uncomfortable for a while – whether that meant freezing on a hillside at night, or directing a team of artists. It made me understand the value of taking notes. It forced me to change, adapt, and grow. I’m so thankful for the opportunity to make something this weird, with this many fantastic people. A year ago I thought my future was going in one direction, today it looks very different.

It’s been a pressure cooker of a year. But a collapse could just be the start of something changing shape.

I think there’s something hopeful in that.

Richard Redwin

We would love to hear from you!

How did you get creative across lockdown?

What did you think about Tomorrow’s Garden?

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