This October, BA Fine Art: Painting graduate Imogen Allen found out she had to self-isolate due to her housemate testing positive for Covid-19. While dealing with the numerous pressures this presented to her as a freelancer, Imogen responded to the change and turned it into an opportunity to creatively explore other areas of practice.
We spoke with Imogen about the latest series of work she created during self-isolation entitled Lockdown Pastels, which you can view more of on her Instagram.
Tell us more about how this new series of work came about. What inspired you to come up with the concept?
When I found out that I had to isolate for two weeks, I initially felt overwhelmed as I was unable to visit my studio in Brixton and had to drop all of my freelance work.
My practice is predominantly oil-on-canvas, and this is what I use my studio for. However I've always found a strong affinity with pastel as a medium. It dawned on me at the start of my isolation that this could be a perfect opportunity to devote time to this medium, and combined with this I decided I would try and sell the drawings as a way of making sure I could continue to pay rent.
I was excited for how the discipline of making a drawing a day could fuel my creative vision, and provide a bank of imagery to work from for future paintings.
It was great to discover I can comfortably make work at home. I feel a lot more free about where I can be creative, and less confined to and dependent on a studio.
The series has provided an incredible fuel for my creative practice! It has showed me how discipline can help with the left side of the brain, and how producing art can be comparable to a ritual.
What were the challenges you found in creating from home?
The main challenge was lack in variation. I do find the outside world and interactions with people extremely invigorating and inspiring. Having no human contact can make you feel starved of something.
My attraction to pastels has a lot to do with the element of touch involved: holding the pigment in your fingers and smudging it around can be extremely therapeutic. The material nature of pastels alone provides a powerful form of connection. For me, how it connects the body to the mind is another level to this connection.
It makes me very happy that those who invested in a piece from the series will also receive the touch that was involved in its creation, and that this can provide something human within this bizarre void in which our connection to one another is increasingly virtual.
Please tell us more about the Lockdown Pastels series. How do they relate to your usual practice and creative process?
My work is fairly instinctive. The lockdown drawings are held together as a group through their production under the circumstance I found myself in, however as images they vary quite significantly.
The subject matter was chosen according to where my mind seemed to wander that day, there was no strict theme. However, on reflection, I can see how motifs such as the window, a clear symbol of my lockdown, run as a thread through a group of the works: you can see it trapped within the chest, the belly and the back of various figures. My home studio was a desk set up beneath an old Victorian window, and the view it provided to the outside world clearly imprinted itself onto my imagination.
My work is interested in the communication between our internal and external worlds: being physically confined to an interior space really provoked further consideration of these ideas. I tried to convey my growing understanding of the body as our first home, the first architecture that we encounter.
The transparency of the bodies which I drew, in which the outside world creeped through and beneath the frames of the body, combined with the nature of the drawings being a physical formation of an internal space, allowed me to consider the ebb and flow of the within and without on a deeper level.
I became mesmerised with how, despite my body being confined to lockdown, my mind could travel far beyond the confines of the walls of my home, and far beyond the supposed 'reality' of the world as we know it.
A nostalgic element also crept into the work. During the lockdown my best friend delivered, through my letter box, some recently developed film photos of us in the sea near Eastbourne in August.
The hazy memory of the day was brought back to life by these photos, and my drawings, A dream of the White Cliffs and Swimming Light, followed my longing for my body to be once again comforted by the elements that lay outside my window.
The blue tones that dominate these images called forth Rebecca Solnit's passage The Blue of Distance, which describes the blue that is manifested in the landscape when it is seen from a distance. For Solnit, this deep blue is paired with longing and desire, and as my blue sticks of pigment carved out these memories of the ocean, from within my bedroom in Brixton, I too felt the beauty of distance.
Doing the drawings enabled me to see that having distance from these sorts of spaces can produce a majestic romance in your mind of them, which if you understand as an illusion, can be as exciting.
One of my favourite artists Francesco Clemente once described, in the context of his exhibition Nostalgia, Utopia, how he sees memory on par with hope, and looking at our past can help us understand our future.
Like many, in my lockdown I felt as if I was in this strange limbo space, almost as if strung between two worlds. I felt like I was floating in a nowhere land with a magnifying glass illuminating my past experiences, and future hopes, dreams and fears. Through the pastels I was able to engage with how these projections intermingle and co-exist only in the present, and from the blank page which stared back at me every day creative possibility seemed endless.
Find out more about BA Fine Art: Painting at Camberwell College of Arts