Collective Isolation Project, week 2: What have you learned from home?
How & what have you learned from home?
In week two of The Collective Isolation Project, we are flattening the curve – but everyone's learning curve is different.
Share a project or story to tell us how and what you've learned at home.
Send your files (photo, sound files or film clips) to our Facebook Memory Bank group and tag us with #SLVMemoryBank.
From at-home schooling to new hobbies, to the discoveries you're making about yourself or the people you live with: your story is valuable to us.
Why your story is important
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned us all into at-home learners, adults and children alike.
The image above, Girls doing schoolwork outside on a step, was taken by documentary photographer Rennie Ellis in 1965. The girls appear to be engrossed in their schoolwork outside, perhaps while a parent was tearing their hair out indoors?
The Library holds a huge archive of materials produced by Ellis – eleven linear metres of correspondence files, diaries, notebooks, drafts of speeches, press passes, tickets, badges, address books and other ephemera, in addition to thousands of his photographic images.
These materials give unique insight into the creative process of an artist whose well-trained eye, to our everlasting benefit, missed almost nothing for nearly half a century, before the ubiquity of the smartphone and social media.
Yours is the story that only you can tell, and this is why it is valuable to us.
How to respond
Please feel welcome to respond as creatively or literally as you wish.
We collect all kinds of materials including photos, diary entries, letters, written lists, oral histories, poems and objects ... our collection even includes socks and hankies!
So send us your to-do lists, your recipe for home-made playdough, a photo of your DIY renovation, a picture of the indentation worn into your couch from sitting there more frequently, a recording of your anecdotes and confessions, snapshots of your children's rainbow paintings or your tear-stained tissues (just a photo of that one, please) ... our collection policy covers almost everything you could imagine, so try us!
If you contribute to Memory Bank, we may contact you to discuss collecting and using your images, stories, objects and experiences. We may not be able to accept everything, but we will endeavour to do so! With your permission, your contributions may be added to the State Collection or used in future Library programs.
About The Collective Isolation Project
The Collective Isolation Project aims to cement this current moment in history, and is our inaugural Memory Bank campaign.
Find out more about Memory Bank.