FURNITURE OF MY IMAGINATION brings together film maker and photographer Paul Daly with Naomi Pullin, Assistant Professor in Early Modern British History, University of Warwick.

Solitude has long been perceived as problematic: beneficial only for a tiny minority of people. Its impact on our mental and physical health is a major area of concern. How to be alone and what constitutes ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ states of aloneness is a widely debated topic in politics, the media and wider popular culture. Paul’s film and photographic portraits are “a study of solitude as a medicinal melancholy, a necessary and positive method for introspection and reflection as well as home to one’s own despairing and weighted thoughts of mortality.” Find out more about the project here.

EMERGING FROM LOCKDOWN explores notions of freedom and the policing of the pandemic through a collaboration between photographer Dave Allen, creative writer Georgie Evans, actor Bharti Patel, and researcher Jackie Hodgson, Professor in Warwick’s School of Law.

The UK went into lockdown in March 2020, restricting our movement and our ability to meet with others in our homes, in cafes, bars and clubs, and even outside. Taking as its starting point a series of interviews conducted as we began to emerge from this in summer 2021, this project weaves the words of Coventry people's experience of lockdown into a fictionalised narrative story, which, alongside images from a mass participation public photographic project (The Coventry Grid Project), then became the film: Emerging from Lockdown. These collaborations explore how we have re-gained our Feelings of Freedom (or not) as we continue to emerge from lockdown.

Find out more here