Melbourne in Isolation

The story this picture tells is both deeply personal and also needed telling. Each image represents a happy memory of time spent walking my neighbourhood with my husband, Paul, over a period of three months, from March to June 2020. It is a record of my experience of a point in time that will be marked down in history as a societal turning point. When I found out that I would be working from home during lockdown, I decided that I was going to go for a walk every day for both my mental and physical wellbeing. During my walks I started noticing the various signs and markings on the ground. The lack of people and traffic was making me see many things as if for the first time. Photographing my feet with these signs and markings seemed to be a way that I could capture my experience of lockdown and isolation. Before long, I noticed that I had hundreds of these images and it seemed like a good idea to combine them into a sort of collage. Taking inspiration from the rainbow, I thought I could arrange the images from red through to violet, but what I discovered was that I didn’t have enough magentas and violets, but I had heaps of grey, so my collage ended up fading from the rainbow through to grey, which talks to me of the gloss and excitement of early lockdown fading into what we now think of as the new normal.