NSA Member Catherine Knight has just published a book of her recent Isolation Windows project. Here she explains how the project came about…..
“During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, I collected images of people’s windows in isolation. Using social media and connections with friends and friends of friends, I managed to collect images from across the globe.
In the short amount of time that I carved out to paint in, I made small gouache paintings from the photos. It gave me a rhythm and project in this topsy- turvy time. It allowed me to visit other people’s houses, other countries, other continents, albeit in my imagination, and ponder our shared global experience.
The project is continuing during the second lockdown, so if you want to get involved send me a photo of your window, including the frame.”
Isolation Windows book brings together 81 of Catherine Knight’s Isolation Window paintings made between March and July of 2020. With an introductory essay by Lizzie Lloyd and 82 full colour illustrations of the gouache paintings this makes a beautiful and timely art book.
Dimensions: 297 x 211 x 8mm
Colourplan 350gsm cover, 170gsm silk dust jacket and 150gsm silk coated pages
“This act of shared imagining is timely, offering sensations of closeness with friends and strangers alike. Though actual human figures never find their way into her paintings explicitly, they are ever-present by implication, through traces of everyday actions: the top of a chair tucked under a table, a towel drying on a railing, a window left ajar, a curtain hurriedly not-quite-drawn. These domestic objects and adornings become proxies for the absent humans; the scenes as a whole, like still-life glimpses into the lives of others.”
Extract from essay “A view of one’s own” by Lizzie Lloyd, 2020
The University of Edinburgh 
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