SOLIDARITY SKY [2020]
‘Solidarity Sky’ was a virtual community driven artwork with the aim of bringing people together through sharing personal images of the sky. The project, which ran during the height of the COVID pandemic from May 2020 to May 2022, invited people of all ages to become the artists in this project. People were able to contribute their own ‘piece of sky’ that joined a larger ‘virtual sky’ made up of thousands of images from across the world. People were able to submit their images through the project’s webpage and social media pages.
The project is the creation of the Netherlands based artists, Luke Conroy and Anne Fehres, who were inspired by a particular quote from the iconic diary writer, Anne Frank. The quote written by Frank, while in hiding from prosecution at the age of 13, said, “I looked out of the open window...over all the roofs and on to the horizon, which was such a pale blue that it was hard to see the dividing line. ‘As long as this exists’ I thought, ‘and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts, I cannot be unhappy’”.
The artists were moved by this quote, written over seventy-five years ago, to inspire an appreciation of the power of the sky to hold our hopes, dreams and desires. In their project they hope to encourage people across the world to take a moment to look up and share visions of something uniting us all – the sky.
The project has recieved over 1200 submissions from the following countries: Switzerland, Iceland, France, Russia, Estonia, Australia, Portugal, Denmark, Finland, Kazakhstan, India, Israel, Bosnia and Herzegovina, The Netherlands, South Africa, Germany, New Zealand, Serbia, Lithuania, Greece, USA, Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, France, Croatia, Romania, Austria, Vietnam, Japan, Moldova, Spain, Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, North Macedonia, Czech Republic, Thailand, Albania, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, UK, Norway, Canada, Poland, Malta, Ukraine and Armenia.