I’ve written about my sequence ‘Once Upon a Lockdown’ before but this is the first time I’ve been able to post all nine pieces together. I began this writing as a sequence of diary entries/prose poems/poems and then reworked each section into a collage using natural materials from my garden, photos from my camera roll and a few cropped photos from the internet. It’s my creative response to being in isolation with my family – one husband and our two young adult children – March to June, 2020. The piece was written for a small commission from Paper Nations which I’ve mentioned before. Needless to say but I will say it anyway – thank you to them for this commission which they awarded to everyone who applied in their Time to Write scheme.
It’s been interesting and involving to work with text and image in this way and more than a bit time-consuming since I tried multiple attempts to achieve what I wanted with each piece. I didn’t always succeed. All photos are mine, taken with my iPhone, either from the camera roll or created for this project. The only photos that are not mine are the ones of snowy scenes, including one of Tolstoy walking in the snow, which I captured and cropped from the internet. I made three of the pieces using free software (from Canva) to make the text and photo collages.
Perhaps this has been a process of procrastination. Certainly it’s been a means of distraction from the news although it has also been a way to engage *with* the news.
Here is the sequence in its entirety. Please click on first image and follow the arrow.
Josephine Corcoran 
[…] social media spats and constant news updates. I enjoyed making a series of collages – see my previous post – and I’m now returning to prose writing, with some poetry seeping in around the edges, […]
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They are visually stunning as well as inventive, relatable and fun! Love them.
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Thanks Marina! So kind of you to say 🌸🌼🌸🌼
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Lovely, Josephine. They work so well as a sequence.
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Thanks Jinny! So pleased you like them 🌻🌷🌻🌷
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I feel you have captured this lockdown time so well with this sequence. Collage was a really good choice as it visually displays how we feel inside, well, speaking for myself here! Your use of roses and petals falling is so beautiful. 💐
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Thanks for saying so, Ann 🌹🌸🌹🌸
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I love this idea. I often use my poetry in my altered books, but I also like the idea of using them on collages.
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I hope you have the opportunity to experiment! Thanks for commenting 🙂
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[…] and previously, which I’ve shown you in several posts, such as Collage Poems (from 2017); Once Upon a Lockdown (sequence of nine prose poems/collages from 2020); Collages of Exasperation (also from 2020). In […]
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[…] 2020, and previously, which I’ve shown you in several posts, such as Collage Poems (from 2017); Once Upon a Lockdown (sequence of nine prose poems/collages from 2020); Collages of Exasperation (also from 2020). In […]
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