By summer 2020, various museums and archives were looking for material to illustrate what life was like for people in the early stages of the pandemic. I submitted my ‘First 100 Days of Lockdown’ pandemic diary – kept as a public record of my own experience – to a couple of archives in the UK and US, and also four collages from Birmingham Collage Collective‘s monthly prompts into a new Birmingham Life on Lockdown project.
The Life on Lockdown project began in May 2020 with a call out to Birmingham’s citizens, which ran for six months. Birmingham Museums Trust started collecting digital content of the Brummie experiences during lockdown with the aim of keeping a record of the Covid-19 pandemic “to ensure that future generations could learn about this extraordinary time”.
More than 400 photos, videos, poems, artworks, songs, performances, and stories were collected, “creating a snapshot of 184 days from lockdown, to the easing of restrictions, to Tiers; from a heatwave through to winter”. The material is online at Flickr and also currently being displayed in an exhibition at Thinktank at Millennium Point.
It was great to see two of my collages appear in the project video, at 1 min 42 secs (dark!) and 3 mins 49 secs (upbeat!).
The five collages in the Thinktank display are:
More collages / info on my collage practice can be found on my Collage project page. I also post to Instagram: @editoriat.
Fiona Cullinan 
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