Many of us are on lock down and health for family and our communities is quite rightly the main focus. We’re all learning to live within new parameters, starting with the obvious, - spending many more long hours inside the same physical space, the four walls of our homes! Looking for creative inspiration, I dug out a clip-on iPhone micro lens that my eldest daughter gave me for my birthday. It’s a neat gadget that enables you to take hi-res ‘up-close’ images so I started ‘exploring’ all the hidden corners of my house like never before, taking photos of everyday objects; food, sofas, cushions, mobiles, pens, paper and dozens of other objects that we use or see normally in an unconscious way. It’s been a fascinating process. In many cases, it’s the first time I’ve really studied what’s around me in such detail. We even turned it into a little game for the DMA Partners team. I posted 2 or 3 close-up images on our WhatsApp group every day and the team had to guess what the object was. After overdoses of Netflix, new cooking recipes and tidying, it provided some light relief! But it’s also shown me how beauty emerges when we look a little harder. Preparing food became a new ‘micro’ world with sliced vegetables revealing rich colours, complex patterns and lunar landscapes. Things that you only see when you really get close-up. In our normal lives we spend so much time 'on the move', rushing from meeting to meeting in cars, trains and planes, often our perceptions on every level are a blur. We see the macro but we don’t see the micro. The micro world is a place to appreciate small things in a new way, uncover beauty and take a deep cleansing breath. There will come a time when we will all be reconnecting with the wider world but I think there’s something that we can learn from this period. I think that a renewed focus on detail will help us when we return to our outside world. And by the way, were you able to recognise the objects in the header photo? Here they are!
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