Art instead of words by Michelanne Forster

​Michelanne is a playwright and author. Her work has been performed  by theatre companies throughout New Zealand, and in the UK, USA and Australia. 
 
During lockdown I painted. I started playing with drawing and painting  as a hobby, something fun to do in my spare time after moving from Auckland to Nelson in 2016. Now, four years later I am enrolled as a Master of Fine Arts student at Massey University on the Wellington campus. My studio is in the old Dominion Museum, somewhere  between what my husband remembers as the Egyptian mummy display and the  hanging whale skeleton. When lockdown commenced the university  shut down and our access swipe cards stopped working. Luckily our tutors warned us this was on the cards and I'd taken most of my art supplies home. I set up a studio in the back bedroom which I shared with my thirty year old son who was between jobs.
 
Our lockdown  family was me, my husband, my younger  son  and my two new kittens from the SPCA. Surprisingly,  aside from a constant low-grade worry about my elderly parents in California, I felt fine. 
 
Do I still feel fine? About New Zealand, yes. About the country of my birth, no. The news there grows darker and more surreal with each passing day. These paintings, done in lockdown  start with cats and end with racism. In between you'll see a Covid fireball heading into a New Zealand landscape, but thank god, it never lands.

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