My creative piece is based around the wellbeing medical students in the pandemic. For most first-year students, coming to Bristol in September last year was their first time moving away from home, and for many, Bristol was a completely unknown city. It is hard to move away from familiarity at any time in life, let alone in a pandemic when the circumstances you are in make it difficult for you to get to know the city and the people in it. Lack of face-to-face contact has meant hardly any time on campus – pubs and restaurants have been shut, lack of societies makes it hard to meet other like-minded people. All this has led to many students feeling lonely, isolated and with no sense of belonging. This is what I have tried to represent in my project.  

 For my creative piece I made a sketch drawing of some of the famous landmarks in Bristol. These included: Clifton Suspension Bridge, Wills Memorial Building, Cabot Tower, SS Great Britain, Clifton Observatory, Bristol Cathedral, Victoria Rooms, the iconic bright Clifton houses, cranes by the docks and the Ferris wheel. I then added colour using water colour paint.  I choose this medium to challenge myself: I am not at all artistic and hadn’t attempted anything like this in years.  

 After finishing my artwork, I cut it up suspending the individual pieces slightly apart from one another. The slight distance the pieces are from one another represents the 2 x metres we have to keep away from each other. This applies both to strangers in the street but also to our peers. Normally we would spend a huge amount of our time studying and learning with other people, but this year we are all apart from each other, the majority of our time being spent in student accommodation staring at a computer screen. The cutting up of the pieces also makes the cityscape of Bristol harder to recognise and the picture more difficult to comprehend, indicative of how hard it is to get to know a city and its people during a pandemic. Finally, the sharp angles and shard-like appearance of the pieces aims to convey a negative, sad feeling, indicative of what many students have gone through.

Ultimately, we have only ever experienced being a Bristol medical student in this broken and atypical world.