Covid and craft - 5 years on -

by Curator and artist, Finn McCahon Jones

It’s been five years since the first Covid Lockdown and I have been thinking back to the craft made during this time by looking through what our public galleries and museums collected to remember this moment. Did lockdown improve the state of craft and the handmade, or did it just remind us that making things is just one of the ways we process the world around us?

In 2020, were you one of those people who made a sort of a vow, or a promise to oneself - to spend more time gardening, to regularly make bread or to create a habit of walking slowly through the neighbourhood; or to just spend more time making things - I was.

Lockdown was the first time, as an adult, I had experienced the expansiveness of time. With the routines of commuting and daily tasks gone we had an overwhelming sense of time as an expansive thing rather than a chronological unit. For the most part I remember lockdown being sunny and spending many hours in the garden, not really doing anything except just quietly observing, being in the moment and playing and making things.

By playing and being in the moment, I mean experimenting and allowing myself to enjoy the process of making without an intended outcome or the need to fit into a larger practice. For many of my artist friends, lockdown was an important time for creative development where one endless day dovetailed into the next. This time was also very difficult for pretty much the same reason. But for this essay I want to remember the strange fruitful space we all entered into (and personally thankful for the financial support offered by the government and that my wife could continue to work full-time).

Lockdown was a generous time creatively. The maker community had an abundance of energy that was directed outwards and given away as activities like free online yoga, instructions on how to make bread, and streams of images of what people had been making aimed at being both inspirational and encouraging to the wider community through Instagram stories.

Those who were not makers were encouraged to participate in country wide activities like heading out to count how many teddies you could spot hidden in people’s windows and gardens. Yet despite the outpouring of creative responses, there were still some who complained about being bored in lockdown.

For anyone with any inkling of creativity seemed to reconnect with hand-skills by picking up an idea on social media and giving it a go, or just by engaging with creative moments in daily life like photographing leaves and flowers or walking. Despite the pitfalls of social-media we seemed to use it productively during this time and shared and commented as an act of creativity.

For a lot of people this was perhaps the first time they had connected with the deep understanding of making things with their hands (bread, kombucha, knitting, felting). And for others they were able to lavish time on their existing creative practices.

During the pandemic lock-down the daily 1pm briefings by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Director General of Healh Ashley Bloomfield [1] were televised and simulcast on radio around the country. These broadcasts became a cultural phenomenon as everyone stopped what they were doing to listen to the daily case numbers in hope of an end to the situation. These briefings became a subject for two tutors at the Yoobee Colleges School of Design Scott Savage and Colleen Pugh, who started a ‘create every day’ challenge to keep students creating with limited resources. Off the back of this, they made a slightly unsettling diorama of Ardern and Bloomfield.

Looking closely, you can see that the diorama is made from chip packets, lids, cardboard boxes, toilet rolls and whatever else was at hand. The materials used in this diorama are just as much the subject as is what is depicted – The covid banner cut from a baking powder box, T\the flags from segments of chip packets, lectern from corrugated cardboard, the person gesturing sign language, from a box of noodles and Ardern and Bloomfield made from some sort of packaging, all assembled with hot glue. I appreciate how this marquet is an assemblage of the lockdown diet - both what was being consumed on TV and from the pantry. But also Savage and Pugh’s obvious compulsion to make despite limited access to conventional art materials. The image of this marquet posted on Pugh’s Instagram went ‘viral’ and ended up in the collection of Te Papa.

This tin-rosette comes from a series of ‘award medallions’ made by Ms Shelby Farmer in the first part of the 2020 covid lockdown, now in the collection of Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland Museum. These rosettes are probably a reflection of the state of the maker as much a universal truth - the awards are for ‘listening to sad songs + only crying a bit’ and other affirmative messages ‘you were creative today’ and ‘you exercised today! ...’ Other awards are for complying with lockdown regulations. These awards have a slow sensibility to them, I imagine the canned drink being slowly consumed, and the day reflected upon. The waste of the activity of drinking and relaxing becomes a meaningful emblem of thought and compassion.

I remember this time well. Many people needed some sort of recognition of how hard it was being at home. Not being able to go out, not able to spend the day seeing friends. Confined in ‘bubbles’ there was constant reporting about people being bored and frustrated and not knowing what to do with themselves which often manifested as rhetoric about individual rights over social coherence.

A photograph of a sticker seen in Otago, now in the South Canterbury Museum, depicts a smiling man in suit and tie raising his middle finger in defiance surrounded by the words “VACCINATE THIS!”. On another lamp post, a sticker with a cancelled sign around Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s face made in the style of government issue Covid-19 awareness signage, were plastered around the streets.

These street stickers were made by unknown artists utilising commercial craft to express their state of mind and frustration towards the government. This group was a fractured minority, but their aggressive craft had clear intention.

Then there were others who used their professional training to create crafts to help ease the tension and loneliness of lockdown.

During the second wave of Covid-19 in 2021, Kristin Koch returned to New Zealand to take up work in the health sector. Part of the process of coming into New Zealand was that Koch was required to go into managed quarantine for 14 days to stop the spread of the Covid-virus.

While Koch was in quarantine, she used her experience as an occupational therapist to create daily craft activities which she shared on the ‘Hotel Quarantine New Zealand’ Facebook group. Her crafts were designed to beat boredom while in isolation – and utilised the paper bags that food was delivered in. Some of the crafts utilising the paper bags were fortune cookies, memory books, woven baskets and photo frames. Koch reported that these simple activities were taken up by some 500 people during their stay at MIQ [2]

What I enjoy most about these things made during lockdown is how they are imbued with aspects of daily life and what was directly affecting us mediated directly through the tacit skills of the maker. I couldn’t tell if museums collected standard craft like knitting, ceramics, or jewellery made by regular makers during this time. All the craft that was collected seems to be centred on the social-history past time of lockdown, rather than the object.

Since there was already a craft resurgence happening in the late 2010s it’s hard to say if the pandemic contributed to the crafts we see in 2025. But what the Pandemic did do is broke our contact with the finished product: The bread already baked, or the material in the bag ready made. Lockdown demanded that we engage with our environment in an active way - meaning if we didn’t have something we had to imagine, improvise and experiment.

We touch things to assure ourselves of reality. Through making, we form our realities by how we touch our materials. Perhaps this tactile reality added to the craft boom during lockdown as an antidote to the uncertainty and anxious thoughts during isolation.

The image at the top of this essay comes from a series of images collected by Christchurch City Libraries of people trying new crafts during lockdown. If anything, I hope this essay reminds you of the promise we all made to stay connected to our immediate environment and remember all the weird fun projects we did.

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Footnotes

1 These 1 pm ‘check-ins’ felt like one of the only structures in an otherwise ‘unstructured’ day.

2 MIQ – Managed Isolation & Quarantine. This was a strategy for managing the Covid-19 outbreak, and often took place in hotels in main centres.