This body of work is a response to our collectively strange past year. During lockdown, it felt like a space emerged that hadn’t been there before. Walking around felt eerie but the city had a new tenderness. Everything in the digital world was chaotic but around us springtime kept soldiering on. Our two and five kilometre limits made the things even more surreal—we were forced to pay more attention to our immediate surroundings while missing those we loved. As everything material fell away, it seemed that the only real things were our relationships and our two kilometre radius of flowers blooming and light hitting familiar places in different ways.
Like a lot of people, as this was happening I started running in the mornings. I read in an article that as the body gets fitter the heart expands, I thought, isn’t that happening to us all?
As lockdowns eased the tentative return to seeing friends felt new and precious. The kindness of the awareness of each others' space was touching, but it also felt overwhelming to see others in the flesh again. As a result of the pandemic, I was in a position to move to a house beside the sea this year. I experienced the second lockdown springtime in the countryside and everything felt strange and new again. Flowers emerged from our new garden, each one a surprise.
This work is about those moments that rose to the surface during these times. Some of those observations depict quiet contentment alone or in the presence of friends, while others are simply about sunlight hitting raindrops on leaves, or the magnificence of a dandelion.
By Niko Salvino
By Niko Salvino
