Following my tutor feedback and comments from other students I have made some changes to the images for this assignment. At the suggestion of another student I have included an artistic statement with the images so that my intention for the series and the end result are all in the same place.

Artistic intention

For this assignment I wanted to create a series of images that looked at national identity, how the United Kingdom and more specifically the English have responded to the coronavirus crisis and what this says about the country. There are several reasons for concentrating on England, first it is where I live and where I have first-hand experience of. Second; because of devolution many of the actions taken by the UK government only applied to England, not all the countries of the United Kingdom. And finally because of what I perceive as England’s uncertainty about its’ place in the UK and, post-Brexit, its’ place in the world.

Coronavirus hit the country around three months after the Conservative ‘Get Brexit done’  government was elected and shortly after the UK left the European Union on the 31st January 2020. Brexit was primarily driven by English nationalism with the populations in Scotland and  Northern Ireland voting to remain in the EU and evidence which suggests that the vote to leave in Wales was skewed by English voters. Freed from the constraints of being in the European Union, and having taken back control, the crisis was an opportunity for the new ‘Global Britain’ to show how its innate superiority, which had previously been ham-strung by being in the EU, would enable it to ‘get coronavirus done’. Unfortunately, despite success in introducing measures to support employees and businesses, much of the government’s response has been characterised by over-promising and under delivering.

I wanted to explore this cognitive dissonance, the gap between perceived and actual performance, between the way a nation views itself and a more dispassionate view, through the combination of images and text. My starting point was William Blake’s Jerusalem which ends with the line ‘In England’s green and pleasant Land’. Blake’s words conjure up a picture of England as a place of fields and hedgerows, babbling brooks and meandering rivers, not a country of PPE shortages and thousands dead. I think this idealised, imaginary, vision of England, set some time in the past has been, and continues to be, used by politicians to support ideas of English exceptionalism. However, the constant harking back to the past, and World War 2 in particular, as well as the unwillingness to deal with the world as it is now, far from signifying exceptionalism, betrays a nation lacking confidence.

My aim was to combine bucolic images of the English countryside with unrelated and sometimes damming headlines to in order to prompt the viewer to ask why are these put together and which is more representative of the country, the image or the text? I wanted the text to function as relay, not to define the message of the images, but instead allowing the viewer to draw their own meaning. Because of this I decided it was necessary to include the text with the images in order to provide some context.

In the feedback from my tutor he suggested I look at other ways to present this assignment and suggested a photobook. I am going to try producing a physical copy but in the meantime have produced a flipbook which can be viewed here