Created in Isolation
BY DECEMBER RAIN HANSEN
FEATURED IN VOL 6, ISSUE 2: home and garden
When I create, each image translates into a Shakespearean drama all based off of little feelings, little pieces, and little stories. These things, they grow and gestate within my cerebral womb and I can’t help but give life to images and ideas that are loud and exasperated versions of how I feel.
Art provides me a vessel to navigate these uncharted feelings. I wanted to create something foreign to my usual color palette — with imagery that feels like Styrofoam rubbing against itself and scissors gliding on butcher paper without a snag at the same time. Clashing colors and glass bowls will do that for you.
I’m still not sure what to make of these times, or these feelings, but one thing I do know is that suffocation and loneliness are universal emotions that are experienced by many at the same time, but they have this insidiously silencing effect that makes them difficult to surface as the shared traumas that they are.
COVID-19 paused time and sent us to another planet completely. Everything around us is the same, but there is this alien scent to the air and streets that I just can’t seem to place when I breathe it in. There is restriction involved in safety, but you can drown swimming in freedom, too.
Masks and gloves (and toilet paper, and paper towels…) have become an icon, a regular topic of conversation, and circulate like an E! News special: who’s wearing what and who isn't. Harsh dividing lines have been drawn over which side you’re protecting. Where you stand will not be forgotten and is judged harshly through the court of public opinion. “I want everything to go back to normal” and “Normal wasn’t working” are the slogans of opposition whose individual ideology separates people more effectively than the red X’s every six feet on grocery store floors.
I won’t ask you to consider where you stand, or why. I just ask that you take a second to remember this time and appreciate that the strange feelings and loneliness are — albeit unwelcome — normal. I ask you to draw out a sense of community from that, and find kindness and fellowship with your neighbor when your brain screams to disagree. There will always be poignant things to remember about the COVID-19 pandemic, but let’s do our best to pepper in some sweet ones too — just for a little kick.•
December Rain Hansen was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska but has made West Tennessee her home for the last 7 years. She is a photographer and writer who looks for ways to push her own boundaries within her work and seeks to question the world around her.