A Process of Healing
Isolation — the state of being ‘isolated’
Isolated — to set or place apart; detach or separate so as to be alone
I am an islander.
The ways in which we might define ourselves as islanders are vast, varied and entirely individual, yet these definitions weave and wind into one another with the same certainty as well trodden hill routes. Isolation is a definition draped over us like an inky grey storm cloud — a fixture of our collective landscape, but one that can be more or less problematic depending on your resources at hand.
In the wake of March 2020’s UK ‘Lockdown’, social isolation became a household term and a framework for living for every inhabitant. Villages, towns and cities became static entities, and, suddenly, digital ways of connecting became a life line for everyone. Like the drawing in of winter nights, experiences that we might have had were plunged into an unreachable darkness. It felt like the surfaces of our realities took on a two dimensional quality.
And yet.
As an Islander, am I not ‘isolated’ all year round, pandemic or no pandemic? Am I not physically surrounded by a boundary of sea? I cast my mind back to my days of attending high school on the neighbouring island, where a literal storm cloud often prevented us from crossing rough seas to school. The joy of not having to make the long journey to sit in stuffy classrooms resulted in spending the day with each other playing football in a soggy field in a force 10 gale. It was the polar opposite of feeling isolated, but only because we were experiencing the separation together. Our shelter was, and still is, found in each other.
Reflecting on this, I considered the resources that help to fill the space between feeling isolated and feeling connected — can we see Socially Engaged Art as a pathway between boundaries? Can we view it as an artery of flow, as life-giving as the water that transfers from cloud to hill to river to reservoir? The new-age isolation we had all been immersed in provided a common ground. I wondered: are we now more connected than before in our shared understanding and sense of Isolation? Are we all connecting to our friends, family, neighbours, environment and ourselves more meaningfully?
The creation of the project “An Aye for an Aye” came from these reflections. Inviting multi-disciplinary artists based in various places over the UK to engage in an exchange with me to consider our own isolation experiences, we collectively probed what it means to us now to feel isolated and connected. The ‘space between’ became filled with our exchanges, culminating in a series of tactile and tangible thought processes that was shared with each other, the landscape and a wider island community. The exchange became a healing process, like connective tissue knitting together to form a bond unique to each one of us. We are not alone, and we are not isolated, when we have each other.
