Interview Feature
Art in a pandemic: capturing the Covid crisis Sarah Thompson discovers how creating a visual timeline of world events helped a teacher manage her anxiety during this extraordinary time. IN mid-March 2020, art and design teacher Nicky Gallagher found herself unable to sleep. She was feeling increasingly unsettled by coronavirus developments and was self-isolating because her daughter had a temperature. “I had anxiety,” she says. “I was watching the news too much and I was stuck at home.” At 2.30 am, Nicky began to research the events of the pandemic since January – dates, facts and statistics – and record them on a visual timeline, something known as story mapping. “It was essentially a mindfulness activity to calm myself down,” she says. Three hours later, she’d drawn three lines of illustrations and posted a video on YouTube to explain her project, in the hope it might help other people. The technique of story mapping is one that Nicky uses regularly at Warren Road, a Talk for Writing primary school in Orpington, south east London, where she works as a year 1 teacher and subject lead. “It’s second nature to me that to tell a story, you visually map it first,” she says. “That’s how we teach.” continued on page 28 26
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