Stay At Home

Stay at Home, 2021
5 minutes

In February and March 2020, as the numbers of Covid were rising in the UK, the government started producing official public adverts to try and generate awareness of the impending public health crisis. As the pandemic continued and the country went into lockdown, I began collecting newspapers and adverts, fascinated by the language of these official government guidelines, and how they were reflected in the news.

Like all of us, I became absorbed in this new language that has been adopted to inform us about the pandemic, and also the rules and rituals that we have collectively found ourselves adhering to during the lockdowns. It was also interesting to observe that at the start of the pandemic my own child was just learning to read and, over the last year and a half, this age group have discovered the joys of reading on their own.

 For ‘Stay at Home’ I invited children who are just learning to read, or are in the early stages of their reading journey, to read out loud headlines relating to our shared experience of living through the Coronavirus pandemic and official government guidelines from March 2020 onwards.