Sheltering in Place by Julie Leonard

Sheltering in Place was written daily over the first year of the pandemic. I often work within a set structure, a form and a tempo for the making. This, to me, is artmaking as ritual. I wrote daily mesostics, a poetic form that uses one word as a vertical spine around which to build a poem. For Sheltering the spine words are the number of days into the pandemic each poem was written. This daily practice was a way to observe and record that first year—from one personal perspective and the world at large. It was a year of closing down and isolation, of unrest and of cruelty, of seeking out small pleasures, of finding humanity in surprising places, and of loss. This daily ritual evolved as days seemed to lose distinction and became linked taking on an adapted form of the mesostic. As this work took on the form of a book the text merged with imagery created over that same period; photography, daily drawings, and scanned patterns printed on a translucent Japanese paper.