You are practicing social distancing at home, you can’t go anywhere and will find it difficult to directly source material or make notes from observations.
You are thinking about place and time and you only have the immediate lived reality around you as a reference.
To begin with, you could think about people who have been isolated from a place or time and who used ideas to suggest escape, or retreat to somewhere else, or created an alternative image to help them contest and resist the prison of the moment.
Here are three examples below of people from entirely different worlds and circumstances who have endured imprisonment and difficult circumstances - you could find many more.
Think about the way that they used images, music and sport to free themselves from their circumstances. Think about the way that this mirror in some part the process of social distancing and social isolation that you are undergoing at present.
Young people feel the difficulty of being forced to stay at home more than older people, personally, I miss nothing and don’t do anything different, except I don’t have to go to work, but I bet you feel contained and that you are missing out on life!
Think about putting an object in focus in the foreground and having a place or location as blurred or out of focus in the background
Think about the contrasting colours that could be presented between the two - a football shirt, landscape; a sheet of Music and a window showing an open sky for example
Or think about things that act as containers
Fridges with food from all over the world
Food stuffs with best before dates
Seasonal clothing in drawers
Medicine cupboards with pills and jars
Muddy boots in a house
Packed bags
Luis Egidio Meléndez
Lisa Milroy
Van Gogh boots
https://sites.google.com/chrome.sussexdowns.ac.uk/arthistory/genres/landscapes
Look at the page on Constable’s painting of Shoreham from Brighton:
Read this page and then answer this question:
Is this a landscape about serenity or about the impending death of his wife?
Now consider these three people and their stories:
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was an impoverished composer who suffered all his life. He wrote beautiful music full of lyric power and the suggestion of nature. As a poor son of a school teacher, Schubert never heard much of his Music performed in his lifetime. At some point in the early years of the 19th century, Schubert caught syphilis.
As his health deteriorated, Schubert was shut up in his house and unable to leave, waiting to die and feeling his body deteriorate and suffering more and more, day by day, he continued to write music of great courage and depth of feeling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Schubert
His final piece is the string Quintet with its famous slow movement
The "sublime" second movement, one of Schubert's rare adagios,[4]:183 is in three-part ABA (ternary) form. The outer sections, in E major, are of an otherworldly tranquility, while the central section is intensely turbulent: it breaks suddenly into the tranquility in the distant key of F minor. When the opening music returns, there is a running 32nd-note passage in the second cello which seems to have been motivated by the turbulence that came before it.
The use of ternary structure to contrast tranquil outer sections with a turbulent central section resembles the second movement of Schubert's Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959, composed at the same time as the quintet.
As is often the case with the very late pieces (written near the end of his life), there is serenity and turbulence with a final courageous resolution in the structure. This could be seen as his essential happy and poetic nature faced with the terror of a difficult death and after a mental struggle, a brave acceptance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_Quintet_(Schubert)
Many young people see Schubert as a boring and dead man from another world with nothing of interest to say to them.
Many people love his music and find great comfort, pleasure or consolation in it.
When a series of westerners were taken captive and held hostage in the Middle East in the 1980s-1990s, Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy tried to negotiate their release. In reality, he was taken prisoner and help captive himself (1987-91). Captivity involved being moved around in difficult and trying circumstances.
For example, being forced into a fridge with the door taped ups and carried down stairs and into eh back of a van. The seal on the door made this very hot and nearly suffocated him. On another occasion he was handcuffed to a radiator with a hood over his head for days on end.
At the time, he didn’t know if the other prisoners that he had tried to rescue were alive or dead, although, he thought he had passed one when, still hooded, they had been pushed past one another in a corridor.
When he was released eventually, he said on radio that he had been able to play some Schubert on a tape recorder on the first night of his release which was rewarding and symbolised his freedom and release.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Waite
Many people saw Terry Waite as a fool or an ego-maniac who had got in over his head and caused more problems.
Some thought he was an arrogant Christian who put his importance and his faith and sense of self-worth before the views of others. Others thought he was a good man, trying to do good.
Nelson Mandela (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela) was the leader of the ANC - The African National Congress. The ANC was the resistance movement to the rule of the white Afrikaans in South Africa and Apartheid - the segregation of the country on racial lines with all of the wealths and political power concentrated in the hands of the minority white race.
Influenced by Marxism, Nelson Mandela secretly joined the banned South African Communist Party (SACP). Although initially committed to non-violent protest, in association with the SACP he co-founded the militant Umkhonto we Sizwe in 1961 and led a sabotage campaign against the government. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1962, and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to overthrow the state following the Rivonia Trial.
Mandela served 27 years in prison, split between Robben Island, Pollsmoor Prison, and Victor Verster Prison. Amid growing domestic and international pressure, and with fears of a racial civil war, President F. W. de Klerk released him in 1990.
Whilst in prison - initially as a violent terror group leader, Mandela went on a path of change. He opened dialogue with different prison governors and guards and moved from a position of violent struggle to democratic change.
Whilst in prison, many of the prisoners found solace, relief and release in following English football clubs and played in their own league - initially using paper balls in their cells and then being allowed to play properly in the yard on a Saturday.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/nov/11/football.film
Mandela and de Klerk led efforts to negotiate an end to apartheid, which resulted in the 1994 multiracial general election in which Mandela led the ANC to victory and became president. Leading a broad coalition government which promulgated a new constitution, Mandela emphasised reconciliation between the country's racial groups and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate past human rights abuses.
Always a ‘hate figure’ for those on the right of the political spectrum, Nelson Mandela died as an international hero and much loved by the people of South Africa.