Nothing before like this has happened to the nation, and nothing could have prepared us for the sudden mass isolation that occurred during lockdown. On the 23rd March, 2020, 27 million people tuned in to watch Boris Johnson's televised address as he announced the new social restrictions. Overnight, our lifestyles were forced to change drastically in an attempt to curb the overwhelming pressure on our National Health Service, aiming to control the infection 'peak' and minimise the death rate. 

Kate documented her experiences of the new restrictions through her two daughters - observing their myriad emotional responses: Sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes bored or indifferent and sometimes just missing their friends. As the days rolled into weeks, she still found beauty in the mundane, watching the activities repeated as they lived in the limits of the immediate vicinity, thankful of being safe with no family or friends at risk.

Wanting to add more breadth to her observations, she started to record people's feelings and ideas as they navigated through this new landscape. Intermixing this, along with the pandemic-frenzied news broadcasting of those seven weeks, her following images gives her slant on an extremely unique period of our history: one that only a handful of weeks later, had yet again changed, taking those temporary attitudes and emotions with them.

No matter how people tried to make sense of the initial lockdown, it was invariably as something as extraordinary to them as Kates’ was to hers’. 

Throughout this project I worked closely with Kate to bring it to life, initially with the project title - VIR us, and then typographically setting each of the images to complete the project as a set that we plan to PR and exhibit.