Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums has launched an appeal to city residents to help curators build a new collection that shows how our everyday lives have changed in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The events of the last few months have given many of us a lot of time for reflection. My job as a curator means I am usually in our public venues or our stores, so working from home has come as a real change for me.
I have spent a lot of time working on our collections management database, adding research and images which then make their way onto our website. I won’t be running out of tasks I can do from home any time soon, but I miss bouncing ideas around with my colleagues in the office or working with the weird and wonderful objects in our collections.
No two households have experienced the same version of lockdown, as has been said “we are in the same storm but in different boats”. My boat is a flat in the city centre which I share with my husband and our cat.
I started lockdown with grand ideas of what I would achieve, but as time went on and I was not as productive as I wanted to be, I felt a constant low level anxiety and creeping guilt that whatever I was doing was not enough. Life has changed and we need to give ourselves time to adjust and realise that time spent coping and taking care of yourself is not time wasted, even if that involves spending hours playing Zelda on your Switch instead of learning a new language!
How has it been for you? Before we all have the ultimate post-lockdown clearout, we are asking Aberdeen City residents to consider sharing objects or images that sum up their recent experiences to help build the Covid-19 collection. Curators are looking for objects, documents and photos that show how the global pandemic has impacted on how we live, work, study and socialize.
Have you learned a new skill, completed a DIY project, photographed empty streets in lockdown, enjoyed new ways of communicating with friends and family? If you have something that you’d like to share, please contact us at curators@aberdeencity.gov.uk Tell us a little bit about the photograph or item that you would like to donate to us. We are looking forward to hearing from you.
This article originally appeared on the Evening Express website. For more information, read about our new combined website.