Home schooling kids, Zooming the day job, caring for loved ones, keeping in ‘touch’, staying sane: ‘normality’ is suspended, questioned even. There’s a lot of pressure. Don’t be too hard on yourselves… Of course, the real key workers are being recognised as all the people who serve and support others both professionally and in many everyday hitherto invisible ways.

That said, artists, creatives are chipping in with ideas and activities to help keep young and old engaged, amused and challenged. Sharing images, skills and techniques. Post COVID-19 will these times be looked back on as a golden age of caring, sharing show and tell? Will we see a renaissance of homespun art and craft? Who knows?

Lockdown Innovations is a series of short texts sharing and celebrating artists and creatives who have used the constraints of lockdown to spur innovation…

First up is Pejac – #stayarthomepejac – who’s currently sequestered in Madrid. Deploying consummate skill and visual wit together with a profound social and ecological conscience, Pejac makes work that combines the wow factor with a heart-rending inducement to think more, care more and do more about the precarity of the planet and our role in its future.

Another aspect to his work is an ability to use the space and materials at hand. Before lockdown, in addition to his superb studio practice, Pejac has travelled the world making a number of ingenious site specific interventions: Green Puzzle (2019) transforms a bed of moss on stone into a flora jigsaw, reminding us perhaps that a natural world we take for granted could easily fall apart; Fossil (2018) is a trompe l’oeil stencil work whereby a tree appears to emerge from a NY wall, bricks being made from material that once supported growth.