Mind Maps of the Pandemic
Friday 9th July, 2021
By Georgina Endfield Jacqueline Waldock
As part of their response to the COVID 19 pandemic, National Museums Liverpool, a partner on the Stay Home Stories project, launched an initiative “Covid 19 Mind Maps”, through which they invited members of the public to create a “mind map”.
Mind maps are in effect depictions of the relationships between your local area, your favourite things, people, pets and feelings. They don’t have to be artistic, just a simple reflection of your world during the pandemic. (National Museums Liverpool)
The maps provide a snapshot of personal life experienced during the pandemic and are representations of domestic space and collages of moments. They are at once sketches of a place and “people’s perceptions in and of place” (Bailey 2019: 198). Many of the maps take as their centre the place of the home, the nucleus of life in the pandemic. Boundaries are marked as distance from the home, be that the garden or within a one-hour circular walk from the front door. They highlight the way in which home spaces changed or were altered through lock down: kitchen tables becoming school spaces and as social lives pivoted to being mediated through digital spaces, a theme being highlighted in others strands of the StayHome Stories project too: https://www.stayhomestories.co.uk/togetherapart-digital-connections-in-pandemic-times. External spaces, be that gardens, parks or riverside walks, are ascribed particular poignancy as places of escape, recuperation and release.
Byrne (2020:353) writes “Most importantly, all of these homely qualities make us feel safe. And they do so specifically by allowing us to retreat from the social world, or in the terminology of the post-corona virus world, to socially distance.” Those who were shielding during the COVID-19 lockdown perhaps felt this sense of retreat more viscerally.
This can be seen in two of the mind maps created by those who were shielding: World of a Lockdown Shielder and The Green House. The author of The Green House map drew an inhaler and labels it the “Reason that I’m trapped inside”. Both these maps focus on the micro-geographies of home. The edges of their maps are rooms in the house apart from the “garden” “front door”, “my garden”. In The World of a Lockdown Shielder the very edge of the area is marked by the gate in the garden marked as 3 meters from the front door.
The World of a Lockdown Shielder Map
The maps draw attention to the couches, the front door and the garden. Annotations include:
Couch now primary residence
My sofa ‘worknest’ the only place in my house I can get decent internet signal!
FRONT DOOR - a portal to somewhere called “outside”
The magic front door where food and deliveries appear each week.
The accentuated focus on the front doors in these maps highlight doorways as key spaces of social contact as well as anxiety, and as a barrier protecting a safe interior from a dangerous, toxic external world. The Green House Map describes an apparent paradox in this respect, with the artist noting their “complete panic at every knock at the door”, whilst also highlighting the door’s significance in providing one of the only points of live social interaction, a place where (socially) distanced conversation with family was possible. This is echoed in the World of a Lockdown Shielder map which highlights the front door as a place for brief and distant social contact as well as concern for staying “3 meters away”.
In these maps, gardens are shown as offering a welcome reprise from the couch, helped by the sunny weather in the first lockdown of Spring 2020. The garden also acts as a barrier, a marker of distance to stay safe. The significance of gardens and outdoor spaces is also noted in other maps. The stark closed edges of the Shielder map reflects a reduction in spatial freedom, a sense of restriction which is borne out by “Baseline data from Jan 3rd-Feb 6th 2020” which reveals ,” a 63% overall reduction in movement” (Drake et al 2020: 385). The maps mark walkways to green spaces, jogging routes and essential shops as spaces external to the home or garden.
Joan’s Lockdown Map 2020
Not all the maps centre on the home. Joan’s map, for example, places her “Yarden” as the core, as “cultivating sanity”. Yarden is Joan’s term for a backyard that has been transformed into a garden. Red brick terrace houses with paved backyards are common in many of Liverpool’s suburbs. Some 16% of homes in Liverpool, 4% higher than the national average, have no access to a private or shared garden. (Liverpool Echo-21-1-21). As key, private and safe spaces, yards, gardens and yardens have taken on particular significance during the lock downs.
Joan’s map also highlights her connection to parks and outdoor spaces and the bird and animal life therein - she has sketched swans, blackbirds and seagulls. This connection with external spaces is echoed in Alice’s and Rosie’s map- the McGiveron map. Their map doesn’t include a garden, but they do note that, “we walk our dog Dixie, [like 1 time a week] we go to a massive field.”
McGiveron Lockdown
Liz also sketched a nearby park in her Liscard map (see below), a map which highlights the challenges in reaching the places beyond her home. Red arrows sweep across her map connecting each of the external spaces back to her home. This is echoed in in Alice’s and Rosie’s map where each activity and space are tied back to their sketch of their home.
Home has long been considered a means of “separating the inside from the outside, nature from human beings, the public from the private sphere” but as these maps demonstrate, the home has been “materially and spatially imbricated with nature, non-humans and the ‘outside’” (Kaika, 2004: Power; 2009) during lock down.
Liscard Map
The idea of home and the home place, argues Creswell (2004, p. 24), “is an exemplary kind of place where people feel a sense of attachment” but clearly never more so than during the global pandemic. The sweeping green lines on Joan’s map and the red arrows of the Liscard map echoes this attachment visual connecting every external space back to the home space. All the maps show the home and its immediate environs as core features demonstrating perhaps how the COVID crisis has served to re-focus attention on the place of the home at once as a place of safety, isolation, separation and dislocation, confinement, fear and confusion. For more about the Mapping Home strand of the project see https://www.stayhomestories.co.uk/mapping-home.
References cited:
Byrne, M. (2020) “Stayhome: Reflections on the meaning of home and the COVID-19 pandemic,” Irish Journal of Sociology 2020
Cresswell, T. (2004) Place. A short Introduction. Blackwell Publishing
Drake, T.M. (2021) “The effects of physical distancing on population mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK,” Lancet Digital Health, Aug; 2(8):385-387
Bailey J. “Mapping as a Performative Process.” pp188-204 Duxbury, N. Garrett-Petts, W.F. and Longley, A. (2019) Artistic Approaches to Cultural Mapping.
Kaika, M (2004) Interrogating the Geographies of the Familiar: Domesticating Nature and Constructing the Autonomy of the Modern Home,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28, no. (2): 265–86
Power, E. R. (2009). Domestic temporalities: Nature times in the house-as-home, Geoforum, 40(6), 1024-1032.