Drawing, Well-being and the Exploration of Everyday Place: 228 Sketches of Clifton Street

A collection of drawings revealing life in an ordinary English street during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This book presents more than two hundred observational drawings that were created every day by artist Nicole Porter as she looked out the window onto her ordinary English street in extraordinary times: the COVID-19 pandemic. This visual record, along with Porter’s accompanying prose, is a unique meditation on place, nature, community, time, and mental well-being and the value of mindfully appreciating them all through drawing. Through Porter’s eyes, we gain insight into the individual and collective experience and place-specific impacts of the pandemic, as opposed to the quantitative statistics of mortality and infection rates that are at the heart of most reporting and analysis.
 

Nicole Porter was born in Melbourne, Australia, and educated at the University of Melbourne in architecture and landscape architecture. She is professor and chair of multi-disciplinary design at the University of Utah.