The project takes place during the third lockdown in the U.K as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The year has been kept track of by 24-hour news, 7 days a week, in a multitude of media forms.

Stacks of unread newspapers sit outside of empty train stations. It seems as though they will remain there, unread, until being replaced by an almost identical stack of papers. They are filled with pages full of Corona related headlines and articles. Expressing the bleakness of lockdown measures. This news and these measures are relentless, regimented, and cold. We are oversaturated with it and them.

Blue News manifests this saturation in colour. It turns the identical articles all an identical shade of blue. It uses sunlight to do so. Therefore, using something which the lockdown has largely taken away from us as a tool to break the monotony of quarantine measures.

The papers were turned blue by being painted with cyanotype solution and exposed to sunlight. Anything covered remains white whilst anything the sun touches turns blue. The durational nature of the cyanotype process reflects each passing day of the lockdown, marked by the daily newspaper.

In revealing the oversaturation of the stories and articles the papers become homogenous. In this pervasive blueness the daily news has gone through a process of erasure.

I attached the Blue News to a kite frame and flew it in the local park. By compiling this Blue News and turning it in to a kite its meaning has shifted. By flying the kite in the public realm, during the little time I can, my relationship with it has been altered.

In taking something repetitive and relentless and setting it within an opposing framework to the sincerity with which it is meant to be consumed, its very repetition and relentlessness are broken; the structure and monotony are transformed into something playful, fleeting and momentary.

Blue News discusses how people may be stuck in one place yet feel the need to find another: a place to move and to be expressive within the city. These lockdown measures, represented and disseminated through the daily news, are directed towards the general population rather than the individual. The kite is tethered to me and therefore necessarily located to a particular place and person. It offers a singular and human perspective of the necessity for light and space within the city.