Reasons to be Hopeful - David Harradine
Above Me The Wide Blue Sky 2013, Photo by Matthew Andrews
“Art is the highest form of hope”, said the German painter Gerhard Richter in 1982. As we approach the end of the first year of life lived with Coronavirus, it feels hard to remember that there’s anything to be hopeful about at all (but the days are getting longer and the evenings will soon be light).
As artists, like so many of our peers and colleagues, here at Fevered Sleep we’ve struggled to know what to do in the face of an unprecedented global crisis. What is the role of art in such times? What can we offer, alongside the extraordinary efforts made by those working in health and social care? What protection can art give? Can it soothe our wounds? Can it help us remember that there is a future? Can it vaccinate us against fear and hopelessness and despair? (your smile as I look at you talking on a video call; the soft caress of your voice).
An invisible virus has reminded us just how deeply entangled we are with other species; how connected we are across continents and borders; how enmeshed we are in each other’s lives. Art reminds us to lift our faces and see beyond our everyday, to look to each other, and to the wild world, finding patterns of compassion and community and kinship and kindness.
Art reminds us that in connection there is hope to carry us through (there is a butterfly hibernating in this crack beneath the windowsill, a dormant splash of colour in the flat winter grey). Art reminds us to listen more carefully, to speak more passionately, to breathe more slowly, to look more wisely and to find new ways to touch and to be touched.
Art offers solace, and it offers hope, so here at the start of 2021 we’ve decided that hope is what we want to create (the smell of your cooking drifting out of the kitchen and filling the house; being able to be vulnerable with my friends, and the strength and love I get in return).
We want to insist that there are reasons to be hopeful, even now, reasons to lift our faces and our hearts and see beyond the challenges of today, the sense of an ending beginning to approach, even if it still feels so far away (the giggle and gurgle of this baby as I queue outside the shop; the bright summer red of these tomatoes; the feeling of change on the cool winter air).
Is art the highest form of hope? Perhaps hope is the purest form of art. Because it’s abstract, and speculative, and it insists that there are different ways to be, in this strange and troubled world.