'First Green' - detail of sunlight on leaves

Date:
2 May 2020
Location:
Watford, Hertfordshire
Reference:
HEC01/036/02/07/03
Type:
Photograph (Digital)
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Description

The Picturing Lockdown Collection was created during April and May 2020, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. During seven days the public were asked to submit photographs that they felt best represented their experiences of lockdown in England, and from these submissions one hundred representing all the different geographic regions were chosen to be archived with Historic England. Alongside these images, ten artists were commissioned to produce their own images over the course of five days, representing their lockdown experience. These were supplemented with images by Historic England’s own photographers. Together, the Picturing Lockdown collection forms a permanent visual record of this unusual time in history.

This photograph, taken at 07.05 on 2nd May 2020, is the third of five images depicting the lockdown as experienced by the artist Roy Mehta, and represents the London Suburbs region. The artist has written the following text to explain how this image documents their experience of lockdown: "‘Nature's first green is gold,Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.’ Robert Frost

For most of us the first few days of the Lockdown was an experience of blurred reality. Perhaps we are transitioning, living through a moment of transformative change, to arrive at a different way of living.

In response my work explores the moments of transition in our locked down days: by making work in the early morning and late afternoon light, I use the opening and closing of the day as a metaphor for beginnings, endings and change.

I live in and am drawn to the ‘natural’ landscape. I love the slowness of the garden, of growing my own food. Like so many of us I have noticed a real change in the quality of the air, a lack of traffic noise, a greater awareness of birdsong and the sensation of time itself being slower.

The purpose of my reading over the past few weeks has been an attempt to counterbalance the often contradictory and sombre news updates with pieces of prose and poetry.

By juxtaposing my reading with my work, I hope to draw the viewer’s inner eye to the sensation of inner peace and of time slowed. By framing my work within these moments of change in the natural world I find a sense of time, of simply living in its flow.

Each piece of text has been carefully chosen and designed to act as a reference to the natural world and to the implications that the Pandemic has had on our position within the environment and between ourselves.

Content

This is part of the Volume: HEC01/036/02/07 Picturing Lockdown Collection: Artists' Submissions - Roy Mehta; within the Sub Series: HEC01/036/02 Picturing Lockdown Collection - Artists' Submissions; within the Series: HEC01/036 Picturing Lockdown Collection; within the Collection: HEC01 Historic England

Rights

© Roy Mehta

People & Organisations

Photographer: Mehta, Roy

Keywords

Health And Welfare