Zoom

Zoom, just one look and then my heart went boom
Suddenly and we were on the moon
Flyin' high in a neon sky, oh oh......  

Len Barry/Bobby Eli 

For as long as I can remember the word 'Zoom' was, in my head, immediately followed by the words above, it's only context being the song by Fat Larry's Band, peaking (I'm reliably informed by Google) at number 2 in the charts in 1982. Not so, any longer.

Over the past year Zoom has gone from being novel to mundane, yet still provides a way of meeting people in real time from the confines of our own homes, in a way that would have seemed space-aged to my 12 year old self listening to the aforementioned song.  And, for the past couple of months it has been the focus of a creative project I have had the privilege to lead.

The brief was simple, to produce a self portrait expressing how you look and feel on a Zoom call, the paths it took me down, turned out to be somewhat complex.

For reasons best known to the powers that pull my strings, I had an inkling to make a mask of my face. I've never done any form of mask making before and yet one Saturday afternoon, along with the assistance of the ever patient Mr L, I found myself disappearing behind a layer of plaster - as strip by strip it began to take on the form of my face, not realising the sense of release that would begin to stir within me: finally the mask I wear was visible, there for all to see. 

What had initially started out as a bit of fun had suddenly got a whole lot deeper and by now I'd unwittingly signed up four other artists to lay themselves bare, or hide behind their own masks as they saw fit.

Fortunately for me, they chose the former (but thankfully for all of us, only figuratively speaking) and week by week as we met on Zoom to share our works in progress and thoughts and feelings on the process, what began to unfold was a shared feeling of vulnerability that had been heightened by the removal of face to face contact and the emergence of a system of communication where eye contact is near on impossible and the time lag silence that follows any verbal contribution to the discussion is deafening, coupled with a dearth of creative spark brought on by the events of the past year.

As an adult there is an expectation that you've, for want of no better phrase, got your shit together and I spend a lot of time projecting that image on the face I show the world.  Oftentimes this is for my own self preservation, I don't want to acknowledge if things are any different and I certainly don't want to talk about it.  But more than that, is a growing understanding that there is so much more of me lying behind the mask and that the face that holds the embodiment of me is but a mere fraction of who I am.  And when, for whatever reason, I don't engage in creativity I am limiting the ways in which I can express the whole of me and my authenticity suffers as a consequence.

So for me, instead of feeling the inadequacies of Zoom and the isolation and loneliness inherent within, perhaps there is an opportunity to connect with the knowledge that I am putting forward a two-dimensional representation of me, and that that's OK.  Let my mask sit there and nod appropriately whilst still not knowing who I'm actually looking at when my eyes are fixed on my own reflected image and let the rest of me go dream and play and explore and plan my next adventure.

For once in my lifetime I was finally free
And you gave that to me....